Rising AI costs will force B2C marketing leaders to scale back a third of AI initiatives, according to Forrester's 2027 predictions for B2C marketing, customer experience and digital strategy.

The forecast points to growing pressure on marketing budgets as AI use expands and more marketing technology suppliers adopt usage-based pricing. Under that model, agent interactions, generated assets and automated workflows become chargeable events, raising the cost of deploying AI at scale.

Forrester expects leaders to focus spending on projects that show measurable business value. It sees this as part of a broader reassessment of where AI should be used and where human input should remain central.

Alongside the projected reduction in AI initiatives, customer experience staffing is expected to rise by 20% after what Forrester described as overzealous cuts. Companies that have spent two years reducing CX teams are expected to hire for roles linked to AI support, including natural language processing engineers, data scientists and AI experience designers.

Those hires are intended to help companies identify higher-value AI use cases and improve how AI systems are deployed in customer-facing functions. The prediction suggests that even as some projects are cut, companies will keep investing in the specialist staff needed to assess and manage the technology.

Forrester also predicts that half of brands will again make human-generated content a top priority. It argues that the spread of AI-generated material across digital channels will push marketers to rely more heavily on experts, customers and documented evidence to build trust and credibility.

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