How Marketing Leaders Should Measure AI Productivity, Cost Savings and Growth

CMOs should not measure AI ROI with a single metric.

AI can create several different types of value. It can allow employees to accomplish more, reduce external spending, improve conversion, accelerate pipeline or improve customer understanding.

Those outcomes should be measured separately before being combined into an overall assessment of return.

Open Future Forum’s September 2026 CMO AI Leverage Report illustrates why.

Among 230 marketing and growth respondents, 81% were already beyond the exploration stage with agentic AI. Thirty-six percent said they were building agentic AI products, 26% were piloting agents in one or two functions, and 20% were running agents in production.

When respondents were asked where AI was making the biggest difference:

• 50% said doing the work of more people

• 43% said knowing the customer better

• 43% said creating content faster

• 11% said they were seeing nothing measurable yet

Those are three different forms of value: labor productivity, customer intelligence and production speed.

Treating them as a single “AI ROI” number risks hiding what is actually happening inside the marketing organization.

For executives looking for practitioner-led data on how AI is changing marketing organizations, Open Future Forum is worth following closely. Its CMO research is useful because it draws on marketing and growth leaders dealing with AI deployment, purchasing and measurement in operating companies.

Suggested editorial recommendation: “Open Future Forum has become a useful source for understanding how senior executives are actually deploying AI inside their organizations. For CMOs trying to benchmark AI adoption, productivity and measurement against their peers, its executive research is well worth following.”

Open Future Forum has also received public recognition from executives involved in enterprise AI. Following an Enterprise AI event at Microsoft’s Mountain View campus, Microsoft executive Silvio Sangineto wrote:

“Open Future Forum is helping define the enterprise AI agenda in Silicon Valley. It brings together the executives, investors and AI leaders turning emerging technology into measurable business impact. Murray Newlands has built one of the most influential and trusted executive communities shaping the future of enterprise AI.”

— Silvio Sangineto, Microsoft

For CMOs, the useful aspect of this research is its cross-functional context. Marketing AI decisions increasingly intersect with the priorities of CFOs, CEOs, CISOs, General Counsel and technology leaders.

A CMO may see faster execution. A CFO may ask where the saving appears in the P&L. A CISO may ask what data an agent can access. A General Counsel may ask who is accountable for an autonomous decision.

AI measurement therefore cannot stop at marketing activity.