Stop hiring AI experts. Train the people you have.

Informatica just published the largest AI readiness survey ever conducted with 600 Chief Data Officers globally.

Peter Benei and Torsten Sandor, 3 February 2026

Informatica just published the largest AI readiness survey ever conducted with 600 Chief Data Officers globally. Yes, CDOs, not CMOs. But if you’re a marketer trying to understand AI, this report offers some interesting insights.

The headline finding won’t surprise you: the technology gap is a people gap.

69% of enterprises have deployed generative AI, but three-quarters of data leaders say their workforce needs upskilling in both data and AI literacy.

The technology works. The people aren’t ready.

Bringing in outside “AI talent” to fix your problems sounds appealing until you realize they don’t know where the bathrooms are, let alone where your data lives or why your processes exist. Informatica’s CIO, Graeme Thompson, was quite blunt: “It’s much easier to get your people that know your company and know your data and know your processes to learn AI than it is to bring an AI person in that doesn’t know anything about those things.”

Chances are, your AI champions are already in the building. Find them. (We have a whole chapter about finding and nurturing AI talent in our AI-Ready CMO course, see here)

When asked who his strongest AI partner is, Thompson pointed to… marketing. Marketing ops, he said, understands that the answer to “how do I get more value from limited program dollars” isn’t more headcount or more ad spend—it’s automation and AI.

Marketing is one of the fastest-adopting functions, and data leaders are noticing.

But if you pitch AI as cost reduction, you’re playing defense. The smarter play: pitch it as removing constraints. New markets you couldn’t afford to enter. New formats you didn’t have the capacity to produce. Initiatives that were previously cost-prohibitive.

AI doesn’t mean laying people off. It means doing things you literally couldn’t do before.

— Torsten and Peter

PS: In our AI CMO course, we teach these AI leadership principles for marketing executives. The course is free and available for all subscribers.

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