New report points to the potential of a new holy union when it comes to creating trust, visibility and preference

According to Censuswide’s early finding in their CMO Report, 2026, CMOs think 44% of consumers are comfortable with AI in marketing. The real number is 19%. They think only 7% feel uncomfortable. It's actually 29%.

That gap holds across every content type tested in Censuswide's CMO Report 2026: social, video, SEO, text and image generation. CMOs are using AI at roughly twice the rate consumers are ready to trust it.

This is the first look at the report. The full findings land later this year, but what's already public is worth sitting with, because it points at a much bigger problem than AI adoption.

Findings from the CMO Report 2026: The Intersection of PR and Marketing, produced by Censuswide in partnership with PRmoment.

Trust isn't one function's job

It's tempting to read the AI gap as a PR problem, since trust is often filed under PR's remit. That's too narrow. Trust is earned through consistent brand and business behaviour over time, through a narrative that holds up under scrutiny, and through independent endorsement from the people and organisations your customers already trust. No single team delivers that alone. It takes integration and planning across the business, with comms and PR involved in the decisions that shape it, not brought in afterwards to explain them.

Which makes the rest of the report's early findings hard to ignore.

Everyone agrees PR works. Nobody agrees on how it fits

CMOs are 32 times more likely to see PR as a help than a hindrance. 88% call it an asset. Only 3% see it as a hindrance. PR gets credited with real business outcomes too, including increased sales and conversion goals, stronger executive visibility, better customer trust and a stronger share of voice.

And yet 99% of CMOs report challenges working with their PR team. No area of shared PR and marketing activity scores above 44% for being "very aligned." Not brand messaging. Not media strategy. Not campaign planning. The two functions sit next to each other in almost every business (92% have an in-house PR function, 86% are fully integrated or collaborating closely), but closeness on the org chart isn't the same as alignment in practice.

That gap isn't belief. CMOs already believe PR works. The gap is understanding what it actually delivers, and how to measure it against everything else competing for the same budget.

The measurement problem is a mindset problem

Budgets are under pressure everywhere, and every pound has to justify itself against a channel that shows a cleaner, faster number. ROAS on a paid campaign is easy to point to. PR's return builds over time, through trust, credibility and reputation, and none of that fits neatly into the same spreadsheet.

This is where the disconnect starts. CMOs are trained to think in attribution and short-cycle return. PR's value shows up in stakeholder confidence, in the way a brand is talked about when nobody's running a campaign, in the credibility that makes every other channel work harder. Until measurement and evaluation catch up to that reality, PR will keep getting treated as discretionary spend rather than the foundation it actually is.

PR is not a tactical play

Brand voice and values have to be joined up and consistently reinforced across every channel and every touchpoint. That's not a campaign. That's a discipline.

PR is the consistent, central drumbeat for a brand's narrative, values and behaviour. It isn't something you switch on for a launch and off again after. It requires conscious integration and planning, sitting alongside marketing from the start rather than being called in once the creative is already signed off.

The report backs this up in an unexpected way. CMOs are clear that some activity, like influencer partnerships and social content, benefits from tight integration. They're just as clear that thought leadership, reputation management and crisis communications should stay distinct. That's not PR being sidelined. That's a sensible division of labour. Some things need one voice steering brand and product together. Others need PR's judgement and independence protected.

The new holy union?

In a market where budgets are tight and every channel has to prove both trust and performance, brand and product can no longer be built separately. Believability has to be earned across every channel at once, and that only happens when the people responsible for it are working from the same brief and the same table.

The businesses that get this right in 2026 will be the ones where the CMO, the Chief Communications Officer and increasingly a Chief AI Officer work as one unit, not three functions reconciling their differences in a quarterly review. One shared view of what the brand stands for. One shared measure of what's working. One shared responsibility for how the business shows up, sounds and behaves everywhere it's seen.

Visibility, trust and engagement don't come from any one function. They come from consistent behaviour, credible endorsement and every part of the business moving together.

The full CMO Report 2026 is due later this year. Worth watching for.

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