Marketing and technology leaders are not aligned on who owns the systems that feed AI chatbots answers about a brand. That disconnect is costly, but Acquia’s new report argues it can be fixed without trading speed for safety.
The CMO-CIO split is messier than a single policy can handle
Acquia, with Coleman Parkes Research, surveyed 500 senior executives across the US, UK and France between July and August 2026. The headline ownership dispute is real: 57% of CIOs and CTOs call themselves the primary decision-maker on content platforms, while CMOs split ownership across themselves, IT and digital leads.
More useful is the segmentation of CMOs into four postures:
- Optimizers (36%) are already running or piloting AI agents and want commercial impact now.
- Accelerators (26%) are ready to move but say their tech stack is holding them back.
- Architects (19%) want managed risk and a single source of truth before scaling.
- Custodians (19%) insist on full human oversight for every AI tool.
Most organisations contain all four at once, which is why a single governance policy rarely works.
IT’s caution is specific: 73% of technology leaders put security first when evaluating a platform, 57% call unvetted marketing AI tools their top governance gap, and 51% say migration complexity is a barrier even as 56% refuse to deploy AI until data foundations are solid.
Marketing’s confidence gap is just as precise: 73% of CMOs say they need AI agent deployment without reputational or compliance risk, but only 32% say their platform delivers it. At the same time, 71% admit they pay for stack capabilities they don’t use.
Rathbones turned compliance into a search win
Wealth manager Rathbones had to merge two regulated platforms under FCA rules without flattening two distinct brand identities. Working with Paragon DCX, it consolidated onto Acquia Cloud Platform in 15 weeks. The result: search visibility up 110%, engagement time up 13%, and accessibility improving from 65 to 90.
The detail that matters is not the platform. Governance and growth were managed as one project, reviewed by the same team throughout, rather than sent through sequential approvals. In a second case study, spirits group Edrington used governed AI tooling to generate and test site components—including a compliance-critical age gate—so speed became safe to ship.
What this means for your team
Acquia’s recommendations reduce to fewer handoffs and more built-in guardrails. Marketing should own what an agent says and to whom; IT should own the technical boundaries and data access. Both should sit on the same roadmap and same review cadence.
Treat AI agents as a first audience, not an afterthought. If content is built only for humans, you risk being invisible before a visitor reaches your site.
The risk of waiting is clear: 62% of CMOs say their organisation would need more than a year to match a competitor’s AI-driven direct-to-customer setup. Meanwhile, 53% expect to report AI ROI to the board, but most analytics still treat AI traffic as generic direct or referral visits. That makes shared measurement as urgent as shared governance.
A quick caveat: Acquia sells the platform category the report recommends, so read it as vendor research with a commercial interest. The survey data is still useful, but the conclusion lines up with the product.
Source: PPC Land
