Acquia, a company that builds website software, published new research today showing that marketing bosses and technology bosses at large companies disagree about who is in charge of the systems now feeding information to AI chatbots. This matters because those same systems decide what an AI assistant tells a customer about a brand, and getting it wrong can damage that brand before a human ever notices. The report points to one client, wealth manager Rathbones, which combined tighter compliance controls with a 110% jump in search visibility during a 15-week platform migration, as an example of governance and growth improving together rather than trading off against each other.

Acquia, the Boston-based company behind the Drupal-powered Acquia Source platform, today published a research report examining how marketing and technology leaders are dividing responsibility for artificial intelligence systems that increasingly shape what customers see about a brand before they visit its website. The report, titled "The Missing Success Factor for Growth in the Agentic Era: A New Mandate for CMOs and CIOs," draws on a survey of 500 senior executives and pairs its findings with two client case studies that the company presents as evidence that governance and commercial growth can move together rather than against each other.

The publication follows a broader pattern PPC Land has already examined in detail. The survey's headline finding, that 57% of chief information and technology officers describe themselves as the primary decision-maker on content platforms while chief marketing officers split ownership three ways, was the subject of a separate PPC Land analysis published this week, which also traced the release's methodology and its earlier distribution from Boston on September 14 before the London version followed on September 22. This article focuses on material inside the full report that has not previously been examined: the four distinct postures marketing leaders describe toward AI agents, the specific numbers behind IT's caution, and the two client migrations Acquia offers as evidence its approach works in practice.

According to Acquia, the research was conducted by Coleman Parkes Research between July and August 2026, surveying 250 chief information and technology officers and 250 chief marketing officers and senior marketing directors across the United States, the United Kingdom and France. Every respondent held direct decision-making authority for content management systems and digital experience platforms inside organizations of 500 or more employees, spanning financial services and insurance, higher education, the public sector, manufacturing, retail, software companies and non-governmental organizations.

Four different starting points among marketing leaders

The report's most granular contribution is a segmentation of chief marketing officers into four groups, based on how ready each says its organization is to run AI agents. According to the report, 36% of CMOs fall into a category Acquia labels Optimizers: they are already running or piloting agents and want commercial impact from them quickly. A further 26% are Accelerators, equally willing to move but describing themselves as actively held back by their own technology stack. Another 19% are Architects, similarly advanced in AI deployment but wanting a single source of truth and managed risk before scaling further. The remaining 19% are Custodians, who require full human oversight for every AI tool they touch, with 88% of that group insisting on it without exception.

Most organizations, the report states, contain a mix of all four postures simultaneously, which it offers as the reason a single governance policy rarely fits everyone it is meant to serve. That structural diversity also helps explain why the decision over who leads a platform choice splits so evenly: 25% of CMOs name themselves as the primary decision-maker, 24% name the CIO or CTO, and 18% name the head of digital. Even where IT does not formally lead, the report notes, it is rarely absent from the process. When it is not the lead, 30% of CMOs still describe IT as a key evaluator and 40% say it is consulted.

Where CIOs draw the line on deployment

While the earlier PPC Land coverage examined the ownership dispute itself, the report contains further detail on the specific conditions under which technology leaders say they will or will not proceed. According to Acquia, 73% of CIOs and CTOs rank security as the single most important factor when evaluating a content management system or digital experience platform, ahead of every other factor tested by what the report describes as a wide margin. Fifty-seven percent name marketing teams feeding sensitive data into unvetted AI tools as their top governance gap today, and 52% point to shadow IT, meaning marketing purchasing standalone AI or software-as-a-service tools without a security or compliance review. Forty-seven percent say marketing buys point solutions that overlap with platforms IT has already procured, which the report frames as organizations paying twice to solve the same problem and adding to what it calls a bloated technology stack.

These figures sit alongside a separate finding on migration itself. Fifty-one percent of CIOs and CTOs call migration complexity a significant barrier to changing platforms, even when 56% of the same group say they will not deploy AI capabilities until content structure and data integrity are solid. Acquia characterizes this as caution and the capacity to act on it pulling in opposite directions: the group most worried about weak foundations is also the group most reluctant to undertake the work of fixing them.

The confidence gap inside marketing teams

On the marketing side, the report details a specific set of numbers behind CMOs' own admitted shortcomings, extending beyond the top-line 41% governance-confidence figure already reported. Ninety-seven percent of CMOs report at least one real pain point working with IT, with speed cited as the leading concern: 55% say IT cannot turn requests around within the timeframe the market demands. Seventy-one percent say they are paying for capabilities in their existing technology stack that they do not use, and 68% report having accumulated tools that impressed during a sales demonstration but delivered limited business impact once deployed.

The widest gap the survey measured between what CMOs say they need and what they say they currently have concerns AI agent deployment itself. Seventy-three percent say it matters that their platform lets them deploy AI agents without risking brand reputation or triggering a compliance breach; only 32% say their platform actually delivers that. Fifty-six percent say their content is built for people to read rather than structured for AI and other systems to use, and 47% say they are not confident an AI assistant answering a customer using their organization's content today would get the answer right.

Underneath those figures sits a further structural explanation the release touched on briefly but the full report develops at length: 29% of CMOs say marketing and IT are measured on completely different things, which the report presents as a reason alignment between the two functions keeps failing regardless of good intentions on either side.

What the report recommends changing

The second section of the report moves from diagnosis to prescription, built around what it calls fewer handoffs and more built-in capabilities rather than sequential approval chains. According to Acquia, 61% of CMOs say they need to work more closely with IT to understand what their existing technology can already do, and 60% say they would rather have their teams self-serve inside clearly defined guardrails than wait for a developer to manually verify every change. The report frames both figures as evidence that marketing is not asking for less oversight, but for oversight built into the platform itself rather than delivered through a queue.

The report also argues for a specific division of labor on so-called agentic projects, meaning workflows where an AI agent takes autonomous action rather than merely producing a draft for human review. Marketing logic, covering what an agent says, to whom, and which workflows it runs, should sit with the marketing team, the report states, because no other function can judge brand and customer intent. Technical architecture, covering data access, system boundaries and what an agent is or is not permitted to touch, should sit with the technology team, because no other function can be accountable for the associated risk. Rather than handing a project off between departments in sequence, the report recommends both halves report into the same project, on the same timeline, reviewed jointly on a standing cadence.

On measurement, the report identifies a gap that predates the current AI cycle but has sharpened because of it. The decline of third-party cookies and tightening privacy rules had already narrowed what CMOs could measure directly about a visitor's journey. AI-driven traffic narrows that picture further still, the report states, typically appearing in analytics tools as generic direct or referral traffic, stripped of the query-level detail that once explained what a visitor was searching for. Fifty-three percent of CMOs now expect to report the return on AI investment directly to their board, which the report says requires marketing and technology teams to build shared visibility into systems that previously belonged to one function alone, including tracking citations inside AI-generated answers alongside traditional search rankings and agreeing on a shared definition of an agent-assisted conversion.

Rathbones: consolidating two regulated platforms in 15 weeks

The report's first detailed case study concerns Rathbones, the UK wealth and asset management firm, which had been running its wealth management and asset management businesses on two separate digital platforms, each carrying its own regulatory obligations under the UK's Financial Conduct Authority and its own distinct brand experience. According to the report, consolidating the two platforms into one meant satisfying both regulatory and brand mandates simultaneously: nothing about the migration could put FCA compliance at risk, and nothing about it could flatten two distinct brand identities into a single generic site.

Rathbones worked with implementation partner Paragon DCX to consolidate both platforms onto a single, governed build on Acquia Cloud Platform, a project the report says was delivered in 15 weeks. The report presents the outcome as evidence that regulatory governance and commercial performance improved together rather than trading off against each other: search visibility increased by 110%, engagement time improved by 13%, and the site's accessibility score rose from 65 to 90 out of 100. The report states that governance and growth were treated as parts of the same 15-week project, reviewed by the same team throughout, rather than as sequential phases.

Edrington: an AI-generated age gate for a regulated spirits brand

The report's second case study concerns Edrington, the spirits group whose portfolio includes The Macallan, Highland Park and The Famous Grouse. According to Acquia, Edrington had a stalled website migration; a traditional rebuild would have required months of developer work and design compromises the brand did not want to accept.

Working with Acquia partner FreelyGive, Edrington instead used AI tooling to generate and test website components directly within Acquia Source, with the process governed throughout by what the report describes as an automated testing library. Even the site's mandatory age gate, described in the report as a non-negotiable compliance requirement for a spirits brand, was AI-generated and built to persist a visitor's verified status without interrupting the editing experience for the site's content team. According to the report, the migration was delivered on Acquia Multi-Experience Operations with measurable gains in user experience and accessibility, and the report frames the governance built into the process as what made the speed of delivery safe to ship, rather than the two being achieved despite each other.

Five recommendations and a stated commercial cost of delay

The report closes with five stated takeaways aimed at readers who have not yet acted on its findings. First, it argues the mandate for both marketing and technology functions changed simultaneously, because AI agents already shortlist brands before a human visitor arrives, making both functions dependent on the same governed data being findable, trustworthy and correctly actionable. Second, it argues speed and governance are not opposites, framing the roughly 40-percentage-point gap between what CMOs say they need from an AI-ready platform and what they report having as a platform gap rather than either a pure governance failure or a pure speed failure. Third, it argues no single function needs to own the platform decision outright, since decisions already split three ways between CMOs, CIOs and heads of digital in its own data, and what matters instead is that both functions sit structurally in the room on the same roadmap and a standing review cadence. Fourth, it argues that roles are changing faster than formal organizational charts are catching up, citing 59% of CMOs who say their teams will need AI and engineering-adjacent skills marketing has never previously required, and 49% who expect to hire what the report calls a marketing engineer, someone who builds and automates workflows rather than only briefing and managing them. Fifth, it argues fewer handoffs beat more approval steps, stating that the organizations closing the gap fastest are not those with the strictest sign-off processes but those with one shared source of truth, one shared roadmap and clear ownership on both sides.

The report attaches a specific commercial argument to the case for acting quickly. According to Acquia, 62% of CMOs say it would take their organization more than a year to match a competitor's AI-driven, direct-to-customer setup, citing outdated IT systems and manual processes as the cause. The report frames every quarter without a shared roadmap between marketing and technology as a quarter in which a competitor further closes that gap.

Reading the numbers in context of prior research

Several figures in the report echo patterns PPC Land has tracked across earlier, independently sourced research this year. A Contentsquare survey of 2,000 consumers in the United States and France, reported on September 2, 2026, found that 23% of shoppers referred by an AI recommendation would switch to a rival brand if the website they landed on disappointed them, a finding that gives external weight to the report's argument that content quality now functions as a brand-reputation issue rather than a purely technical one. Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey, cited in PPC Land's explainer on the chief marketing officer role, found that martech's share of marketing budgets fell to 19.4% from 26.6% in 2021, a decline that adds financial pressure behind the report's finding that 71% of CMOs say they are already paying for stack capabilities they do not use.

The report's framing of AI agents as a first audience for brand content also aligns with an argument PPC Land covered in June, when IAB Australia mapped how agents weigh brands on structured data points rather than creative impressions, a mechanism that helps explain why 56% of CMOs in the Acquia survey describe their content as built for people to read rather than for AI systems to parse. Cloudflare's EmDash content management system, covered by PPC Land in April, ships with a built-in Model Context Protocol server in every instance, part of a broader shift toward platforms designed for AI agents to act on rather than merely read, a shift the Acquia report treats as already underway rather than hypothetical.

Commercial context

Acquia describes itself as the world's number one Drupal hosting provider and sells Acquia Source, which it calls a digital command center where teams manage content, applications, AI agents and analytics from a single workspace. The company was co-founded in 2007 by Dries Buytaert, who began the Drupal project as a message board at the University of Antwerp in 2000, according to the company's own account. A study concluding that marketing and technology teams need one governed platform built together points toward the exact category of product Acquia sells, a commercial interest that does not by itself invalidate the underlying survey data but is worth noting alongside it, consistent with the caution PPC Land's earlier analysis of the same release applied to its central ownership-dispute claim.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Acquia, the Boston-based Drupal hosting and digital experience platform company; 250 chief marketing officers and senior marketing directors and 250 chief information and technology officers surveyed by Coleman Parkes Research; and two named Acquia clients, wealth manager Rathbones and spirits group Edrington.

What: A research report detailing four distinct postures marketing leaders hold toward AI agent deployment, ranging from Optimizers already running agents commercially to Custodians requiring human sign-off on every action; specific figures behind chief information and technology officers' security and migration concerns; a set of recommendations for merging marketing and technology decision-making into a single reviewed roadmap; and two case studies, Rathbones and Edrington, presented as evidence that regulatory governance and measurable commercial gains can be delivered from the same project rather than traded against each other.

When: The underlying survey was fielded between July and August 2026. Acquia's press materials on the same research circulated from Boston on September 14 and from London on September 22, and the full report containing the material in this article was published today, September 25, 2026.

Where: Survey respondents were based in the United States, the United Kingdom and France. Rathbones operates as a UK-regulated wealth manager; Edrington's website migration involved a business-to-business property managed by a team based in the Dominican Republic.

Why: The report argues that AI systems increasingly determine what a customer or prospect learns about a brand before any human interaction occurs, which turns the software governing a company's content into a question of accountability shared between marketing and technology leadership rather than one owned by either function alone. Its case studies offer a practical counterpoint to the confidence gap its own survey measures, suggesting that regulated organizations have already combined tighter governance with measurable commercial improvement inside a single project timeline.