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Australian CFOs could be looking to wind back AI advertising budgets as marketers burn through expensive frontier models on tasks that don't warrant them, according to IBM's 2026 ACAM Australia AI in Marketing Benchmark Report.
The report measured 126 Australian CMOs and senior marketing leaders across 12 industries against seven maturity drivers and six levels of AI maturity and was presented at an IBM event by Douglas Nicol, co-founder of ACAM, and Karin Du Chenne, executive group director at Kantar.
Nicol said the core problem was a mismatch between the complexity of the task and the power of the tool being used.
"We actually use AI frontier models to solve relatively simple marketing problems," said Nicol.
"But it's a problem because you are in effect using a jackhammer to open a walnut.”
“And that means that your burn rate of tokens and the cost of AI is going to increase more and more during the course of the year.”
"Sometimes we're using these really amazing models for really simple use cases, and we're already hearing of CFOs starting to complain about the cost of AI for the business."
That cost pressure is being compounded by a shift in how organisations access AI in the first place.
Where last year most marketers were using private accounts and individual tools, this year the report found a move toward enterprise-wide deals with major AI platforms, arrangements Nicol likened to arranged marriages.
"It used to be you had two or three tools and you were kind of using your private accounts and all sorts of stuff,” he said.
“And now organisations generally have been given an enterprise kind of exclusive deal with one of the big platforms, and we think of that as an arranged marriage because you don't always choose the person you're marrying in terms of the AI platform," said Nicol.
Nicol warned the satisfaction split within those arrangements was notable, with 55% of CMOs rating their enterprise AI platform agreements as good or better than expected, while 45% reported they were disappointed, found it harder to use than expected, or rated the AI as only adequate.
“We do hear people complaining about the kind of arranged marriage,” he said.
“This is kind of an interesting warning flag for us because what we've got is this really interesting dynamic around the cost of AI going up within the organisation.
“The CFO is seeing an increasingly escalating budget as we start to spend more money on tokens, and our own rate of tokens and our use of AI accelerates…”
Du Chenne said the pace of change itself was making the cost problem harder to solve.
"Despite it all, now AI's promise is to save you time, make things easier. What is the biggest barrier? Time," said Du Chenne.
"We're trying to change the tire while the car is going, and I think that's the biggest challenge."
The operational risks are also mounting.
AI slop content has emerged as the number one concern, cited by 61% of CMOs, with 32% citing brand damage as a related risk.
A CMO panel at the conference illustrated how uneven AI maturity is distributed across Australian organisations, and how that gap shapes the cost and integration pressures Nicol described.
At the more advanced end, Miki Luong, chief marketing and communications officer for IBM ANZ, said a three-year head start had insulated the company from some of the friction other organisations were experiencing.
"I think IBM has the benefit of being involved in AI since its beginning, and we are in IT, so there is no fear for the technology, and we've been on this transformation for three years," said Luong.
"This is across the business, and we've made $4.5 billion US in operating cost savings."
SBS sits further back on the curve. Uma Oldham, director of marketing at SBS, said the publisher had the foundations in place but was hitting the scaling constraints that Nicol flagged as a sector-wide problem.
"We've got a dedicated AI team, we've got a bunch of use cases that are now live within the business, and we've got established governance structures," said Oldham.
"But we are having limitations in scaling just because of that data and technology integration."
Lahnee White, CMO at Discovery Parks, experience cut closest to the report's central warning.
After investing in a proprietary AI platform, she explained how the company abandoned it when staff began adopting external tools organically to keep up with rapidly evolving industry pressures.
"We built and invested in this platform and we had to realise that actually this wasn't a good use of funds anymore,” said White.
“Our team was starting to tell us the feedback with their feet because they started to organically adopt the market tools available.
"Our learning is probably never build yourself when you can buy a partner."
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