AI becomes top planned budget increase, edging last year’s ABM lead

The line item B2B marketers most want to grow next year is AI. B2BMX Insights released its 2026 Benchmark Report on November 10, and James Hickey's write-up for Demand Gen Report puts the headline number at 60.4%: that's the share of B2B marketers increasing budget for AI-powered marketing tools and platforms. A year ago the top spot belonged to account-based marketing at 44.7%, and AI barely made the headlines.

Subtract one from the other and AI clears last year's leader by 15.7 points. Big jump. It also arrives just as marketing leaders sit down to write 2027 plans. For the marketing VP who has to defend those plans to a CFO, the survey answers one question clearly, which is what the AI money is buying. The second question, whether that spending pays back, is still open.

Content soaks up the AI money

Most of this money is moving over from other budgets. Half of respondents said they're reallocating budget toward AI tools and platforms, and many are cutting spend in areas where AI now handles the work more efficiently. So the AI line grows by shrinking something else, and any team planning 2027 should know exactly which program is paying for it.

Content is where the money lands. Seventy percent of marketers use AI to draft and scale content production, and 75% of organizations have generative AI content tools in their MarTech stack. That makes them the most widely adopted tool category in the whole survey. The roadmap points the same way: generative AI is the most popular tactic marketers plan to test or deploy in the year ahead. In 2025, that position went to multichannel lead nurturing.

Read the grid from bottom to top and the picture sharpens. Tools are nearly everywhere, at 75% adoption. Use across several workflows reaches only 35.9%, and a smaller group is still evaluating or piloting. B2BMX Insights presents that spread as a benchmark for where peers already put AI to work. For a marketing operations lead, it's more useful than the adoption headline, because a tool you license and a workflow you've rebuilt around it cost very different amounts and return very different amounts.

Faster content, unproven returns

Separate research reaches the same ranking and adds a warning. In its B2B trends study for 2026, published in October 2025, the Content Marketing Institute found 45% of B2B marketers naming AI-powered marketing tools as a top-three area for increased investment, more than any other area. It also found that 95% say their organizations use AI-powered applications. Then comes the useful part. Among marketers using AI content tools, 87% reported higher productivity, but only 39% reported better content performance.

Nearly nine in ten B2B marketers using AI content tools say they work faster, yet only about four in ten say the content performs better, and the 2027 budget defense lives in that gap.

Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey, released in May, shows how much money now rides on closing that gap. CMOs put an average of 15.3% of marketing budgets toward AI initiatives, yet Gartner found only 30% ready to scale AI capabilities. HubSpot's April 2026 trends research found 73% of marketers saying their budget gets more scrutiny than it used to. In a Madison Logic and Harris Poll survey, 90% of marketers agreed that anyone who can't show business impact will struggle to defend their budget.

Taken together, these figures suggest the next round of budget conversations will move from adoption to outcomes. Counting AI-drafted assets is easy. Showing that those assets moved accounts through the pipeline is the evidence a finance team is likely to ask for, and most teams haven't yet set up their reporting to provide it.

Why ABM isn't losing its job

A ranking flip can make it look as if marketers are choosing AI over ABM. The underlying data argues against that reading. Demand Gen Report's June 2026 Account Based Marketing Benchmark Survey, also by Hickey, found personalized content was the highest-ROI ABM tactic, picked by 47% of respondents, with executive events second at 27%. Account-based advertising and direct mail were also cited as strong performers.

Personalized content is exactly the work AI drafting tools speed up. That suggests a good part of the new AI budget is a tool budget feeding account-based programs, and the two don't compete as cleanly as the headline implies. The October 14 preview of the same benchmark points the same way: it reported in-person events and trade shows as the top channel for pipeline investment in 2026, after digital channels led the 2025 plan. It also reported that pipeline influenced had overtaken MQL counts as the metric marketers are most often measured on.

Forrester's 2027 B2B go-to-market predictions, released October 21, add the buyer's side. The firm expects AI agents to influence 75% of B2B purchase decisions. It also predicts buyers will double their human interactions with provider teams, analysts and references to check what AI recommends, and that two-thirds of providers will lose deals because buyers can't verify their claims. If those forecasts hold, the highest-value marketing spend sits where proof and personal contact happen. For a team funding AI by trimming ABM, the risk is cutting executive events or account-specific proof points, which are the tactics with the strongest reported return.

Pressure-testing the 2027 AI line

The benchmark gives planners three questions worth asking before budgets lock. First, which program is paying for the AI line? If half of peers are reallocating, the program losing money deserves the same ROI review as the tools gaining it. Second, is the spend buying a tool or rebuilding a workflow? With 35.9% of peers using AI across several workflows, that's a fair line between experimenting and running AI in day-to-day operations. Third, does reporting track how content performs or only how much gets made? CMI's 87% and 39% split shows why the second number is the one to defend.

The next public read on these questions comes soon. On November 18 at 2 p.m. ET, Madison Logic CEO Keith Turco joins Hickey for a Demand Gen Report webinar on how AI and performance-driven strategy will shape B2B marketing in 2027. Turco's stated position is that AI enhances human judgment rather than replacing it. The more useful signal for planners will be whether anyone can show stage-by-stage pipeline movement that traces back to AI-assisted content, because that's the evidence the 60.4% will need by the time 2027 budgets come up for review.