Vendor activity is outpacing enterprise action. Martech Futurist | May 21, 2026
Recent research surfaces a single dominant pattern: the AI infrastructure layer and the data layer underneath it are consolidating faster than most marketing organizations are restructuring around them. Gartner's latest forecast puts global AI spending at $2.59 trillion in 2026, a 47% jump year-over-year, with enterprises still trailing vendors and hyperscalers on actual deployment. At the same time, two of the largest martech and CX acquisitions of the cycle closed or were announced inside a single week — Publicis Groupe's $2.2B move on LiveRamp and Qualtrics' $6.75B close on Press Ganey Forsta. Both deals are explicit data-layer plays designed to feed agentic systems. Read alongside Forrester's CX shift commentary and new HBR research on privacy, the through-line is clear: the firms gaining ground in 2026 are buying or building proprietary data assets, then orchestrating AI on top of them. Everyone else is paying tool subscriptions and waiting for ROI.
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Gartner Forecasts Worldwide AI Spending to Grow 47% in 2026 — Gartner Newsroom, May 19, 2026
Gartner projects $2.59 trillion in worldwide AI spending for 2026, with AI infrastructure accounting for over 45% of the total and AI model consumption growing 110% year-over-year as enterprises move from copilots to multistep agentic workflows. VP Analyst John-David Lovelock identifies 2026 as the inflection year for enterprise AI spend, and flags a structural problem CMOs should internalize: most organizations are still pursuing tactical efficiency gains rather than disruptive transformation, which is why CIOs and CMOs alike are struggling to prove value. Marketing leaders sitting on 15% AI budget allocations need to be asking whether their spend is going to infrastructure they control or to per-token consumption inside vendor software, because the answer determines who captures the productivity gains.
How Stronger Privacy Laws Convinced Consumers to Share More Data — Harvard Business Review, May 19, 2026
New research from Klaus M. Miller and Z. John Zhang analyzes 16,000 U.S. customers in California and Virginia after the 2023 state privacy laws took effect, and finds that app users in those states shared more data — and more diverse data — than users in less regulated states. Clearer disclosures, explicit consent mechanisms, and visible safeguards increased trust most among the consumers who were previously the most reluctant to share. The strategic takeaway for marketing teams: privacy infrastructure functions as a growth lever, not a compliance cost. Brands treating consent flows as friction are leaving first-party data on the table that brands treating them as a trust signal are collecting.
From My Work With CX Leaders: Three Shifts Defining 2026 — Forrester, May 18, 2026
Katy Cobian, drawing on direct work with CX executives at top North American financial services firms, identifies three shifts: CX moving from siloed function to enterprise-scale operating rhythm, score-obsessed measurement giving way to outcome-obsessed accountability tied to growth and cost-to-serve, and AI moving from awareness onto the CXO agenda as a force reshaping design, workforce models, and the role itself. The leaders pulling ahead are operationalizing AI inside CX rather than studying it. Cobian's framing matters because it documents what's actually happening inside enterprises right now, separate from the predictions cycle.
Acquisition commentary: Publicis to acquire LiveRamp — May 17, 2026, and Qualtrics completes acquisition of Press Ganey Forsta — May 18, 2026
Publicis is paying $2.2B in cash for LiveRamp at a 30% premium, explicitly framing the deal as preparation for what it calls the agentic era. The strategic logic: identity resolution and data collaboration become more valuable, not less, as AI agents start mediating brand-consumer interactions, because agents need clean, permissioned, addressable data to act on. Qualtrics' $6.75B Press Ganey Forsta close is the largest tech acquisition in Utah history and creates what the company describes as the world's largest proprietary human experience dataset, with patient feedback from over 41,000 healthcare facilities feeding an AI prediction layer. Read together, both deals signal that the holding companies and CX platforms are placing the same bet: the durable moat in an AI-mediated market is proprietary, contextual, permissioned data, and the window to acquire that data at reasonable valuations is closing. CMOs and CX leaders working without a data acquisition or partnership strategy of their own should expect their vendors' new capabilities to compound faster than their own.
My Takeaways
Three signals to act on this week:
First, the AI spending growth Gartner is forecasting is concentrated in infrastructure and model consumption, which means marketing organizations buying AI through software subscriptions are paying for someone else's stack rather than building their own capability. Audit where the spend goes and what the org owns at the end of the contract.
Second, the HBR privacy research overturns the assumption that consent friction reduces data collection — well-designed privacy infrastructure earns more data from previously reluctant consumers, which is the cohort most marketing teams have written off.
Third, the back-to-back Publicis-LiveRamp and Qualtrics-Press Ganey Forsta deals confirm that the agentic AI era runs on proprietary data assets, and the companies executing data acquisitions now are setting the price floor for everyone who waits. Cobian's CX shifts give the operational frame: the work is moving from awareness to operationalization, from scores to outcomes, and from siloed teams to enterprise-scale orchestration. The leaders treating 2026 as another planning cycle are losing ground to the ones treating it as a restructuring year.