AI use among marketers hits 96% as focus turns to effectiveness, study says
Marketers are starting the process of moving AI use from generating efficiencies to building effectiveness – but measurement challenges remain.
· Marketing WeekBy Josh Stephenson 30 Sep 2026 6:00 am
Research from the WFA shows adoption of AI across marketing has reached near ubiquity as marketers turn their focus towards scaling adoption.
The research, which surveyed 54 marketers across 46 brands, shows 96% of marketers are now using agentic or generative AI for marketing, up from 45% back in 2023. It is fair to say that for most brands AI is no longer an emerging capability and is now a part of the day to day.
But what are brands using it for? AI adoption is still largely led by content creation (80%) and productivity and team efficiencies (74%) but is showing up increasingly in research (72%) as well as in media buying, planning and optimisation (54%).
What’s interesting is that AI use is starting to grow in more strategic areas of the marketing function, with strategy and planning (48%) and workflow automation (46%) being steadily adopted by more and more teams.
This ties into the wider point that the research makes that AI usage is starting to shift from experimentation to a broader integration.
In October 2025, the WFA found 23% of marketing teams had limited or ad hoc AI adoption, a number that has now dropped to just 16% of teams.
The number of teams with moderate AI adoption has remained relatively consistent (60% in 2025 vs 57% in 2026) but the number of teams with advanced adoption has exploded from just 16% last year to 27% today.
All of this means brands’ ambitions for AI are starting to move beyond mere efficiencies towards improving marketing effectiveness.
An equal split of the surveyed marketers (22% each) see their ambitions for AI use as split between improving efficiencies and effectiveness.
A further 18% see the potential for driving business growth and one-third are looking to improve all equally.
Meanwhile, the priorities for AI over the next 12 months is dominated by scaling adoption (63%) and training and upskilling staff (55%), with AI literacy remaining a significant skills gap for many teams.
Only a quarter of teams (26%) believe most employees have a good understanding of AI – with the vast majority (69%) believing awareness varies considerably across teams and individuals.
A snapshot of some of the qualitative responses to the survey show the challenge for adoption comes most from time and resources as well as uncertainty as to how to go about doing it.
How Octopus Energy uses AI to enable better customer experiencesWhile each brand is in a different stage of its journey in adopting AI, what is telling from the research is how much agency use of AI remains opaque to many.
Around one in five (16%) brands have “very little” insight into agency AI use and a further 29% only have “some” level of insight. One third (36%) have a fair amount of knowledge while just 13% have a great deal.
Contracts are becoming a key way to tackle this challenge, 59% of respondents admit to introducing specific AI-related clauses to agency deals, with a further 22% planning to in the near future. Overall, 64% of brands are demanding disclosure from their agencies when AI is used in delivering work.
Finally, despite all the talk from marketers and brands that effectiveness is rising on the agenda for measuring success, the vast majority of KPIs are still heavily skewed towards efficiency metrics.
Time saved, cost savings and productivity gains (all 52%) are the main KPIs for most teams, with a further 45% tracking speed to market. A worrying 30% of respondents don’t have any KPIs set up as of yet.
All told, the research shows that while marketing has made much progress in adopting AI across the industry, work still needs to be done to see it develop beyond a mere time saver.