Of every priority Acquia tested with marketing chiefs for 2027, embedding governance into AI initiatives drew the least confidence: 41% of CMOs said their own team can do it, against 73% for driving revenue growth. The figures come from a survey of 500 senior executives that the content-platform vendor commissioned and released from Boston on 14 September.

The result lands as AI assistants increasingly describe brands from the content companies publish. An Empirank audit published on 18 August found that 11% of the 182 local businesses a search-enabled OpenAI configuration recommended carried at least one claim the evidence contradicted, so the question of who signs off on what reaches a content system is a live brand issue. Acquia says the answer is joint ownership by marketing and IT. Its data supports something narrower.

What did Acquia’s survey find about AI governance?

Acquia’s survey found that 41% of CMOs are confident their own team can embed real governance into AI initiatives, the lowest score of any 2027 priority the company tested. Acquia does not say how many priorities it tested. Alongside that figure, 66% of CMOs said proving their AI-generated marketing is governed and controlled has become a brand-reputation issue rather than purely an IT one, and 43% named failure to prove a return on AI investment as the biggest threat to their position in 2027.

The stated cause is infrastructure. According to Acquia, 61% of CMOs said their content is spread across so many systems that nobody holds a single reliable source of truth, and 40% said their stack is ready for AI agents to work inside it today. Technology chiefs showed caution from the other side: 70% of CIOs and CTOs called data sovereignty essential, 56% said they will not deploy AI capabilities until content structure and data integrity are solid, and 51% called migration complexity a significant barrier to getting there.

Coleman Parkes Research ran the fieldwork in July and August 2026, and VCCP analysed the results. Each group of 250 respondents covered the US, UK and France. The report is titled “The Missing Success Factor for Growth in the Agentic Era: A New Mandate for CMOs and CIOs”.

Who decides on the CMS and DXP, according to each side?

CIOs and CTOs in Acquia’s sample are far more likely than CMOs to say technology holds the decision on the content management system and digital experience platform. Asked who runs those decisions, 25% of CMOs said marketing, 24% said IT and 18% pointed to the head of digital. Among technology chiefs, 57% said they are the decision maker and 66% the key evaluator, while CMOs and marketing directors registered at 33% as decision makers and 42% as evaluators in their account.

Acquia reads the gap as evidence that the two functions are “describing two different decision-making structures inside the same organisations”. Chief executive Chris Tranquill framed the remedy as a matter of brand trust, which he said is now “judged instantly, by a machine” and is won when what an AI agent finds about a brand “comes from one governed source of truth, built by marketing and IT together”. Acquia sells content management, and its own site markets a Govern AI Content solution, so the remedy points at its catalogue.

Acquia offers one customer as evidence that governance and growth need not trade off. Edrington, the spirits group behind The Macallan and Highland Park, worked with Acquia partner FreelyGive to use AI to generate and test website components inside Acquia Source during a stalled site migration, including a compliance-critical age gate, without slowing its editors. The release does not say who owned the platform decision at Edrington or report a cost or compliance outcome, so the example shows build speed on one project rather than a settled chain of accountability.

How far does the survey’s claim of disagreement stretch?

The survey’s central claim, that marketing and IT disagree inside the same organisations, goes further than its design supports. The two surveys drew on separate pools of 250 respondents, and nothing in Acquia’s release indicates that a CMO and a CIO worked at the same company. The comparison is between two groups of executives, not between colleagues, as trade title PPC Land noted in its own analysis of the release on 24 September.

The response formats also look different. The three CMO answers add up to 67%, and the release does not say how the other third responded. The technology side’s evaluator answers, 66% naming IT and 42% naming marketing, total 108%, which is possible only if respondents could name more than one function. Acquia describes both as the same question. At 250 respondents, a proportion near 50% carries a margin of error of roughly six points on a random sample, which a commissioned executive panel is not guaranteed to be, and the one-point gap between marketing and IT among CMOs sits well inside that.

The direction is not isolated, though the measures differ. A ProGEO.ai survey of 112 marketers at the RSAC security conference, published in April, found 76.8% worked under a formal generative AI policy while 43.8% said it was enforced with technical controls. That measures enforcement rather than confidence, and it comes from a conference sample dominated by cybersecurity firms.

The 41% is also a narrower number than it first appears. It is a share of 250 CMOs across three countries, drawn from a vendor-commissioned survey, and Acquia does not break it out by sector, so it is not a benchmark for B2B SaaS marketing teams in particular.

Acquia’s release gives no question wording, no country split and no pairing of respondents by company.