US marketers say AI lowers their marketing overhead costs by 14.6% on average, though the typical respondent reports 10%

Workflow & automation

14.6%

average cut in marketing overhead costs reported from using AI by US CMOs (2026 survey)

Reader Note:: This figure rests on 160 respondents, who were asked to state the percentage improvement they had experienced. The mean of 14.64% sits well above the median of 10%, with answers running from 0% to 75%. It is statistically indistinguishable from the 14.06% the same question returned for sales productivity, so the two should not be read as different sizes of effect. Self-assessed, with no control group, no baseline and no verification.
Evidence:: Self-reported behaviour
Vendor interest:: Low
Sample:: Online survey of 308 marketing leaders at U.S. for-profit companies drawn from a sample of 2,111; 14.6% response rate; 97% were VP level or above.

Good for

A rough sense of size and direction, and deciding what to look at first.

Exact numbers, or saying that one thing caused another.
This is an aggregated or average number that covers very different cases. Real results in a particular segment may differ.
The source talks about this as cause and effect — that is its reading, not a finding.
The source never says how this number was measured.

10%

of organisations are realising significant ROI from agentic AI in Deloitte’s 2025 survey of 1,854 EMEA executives

24–56%

of marketing tasks are currently performed using AI or ML, rising to over half in three years according to US CMOs (2026 survey)

Our Substack turns the data behind these cards into full breakdowns: what changed, why, and what to do about it.

90% of CMOs are experimenting with AI but fewer than 10% have scaled it or realized value across marketing workflows

42.3%

of wrong AI answers were overridden with incentives and item-level feedback in Study 3 versus 20.0% in the control group

14%

average increase in sales productivity reported from using AI in marketing by US companies (2026 survey)

77% of brands say AI-assisted influencer campaigns perform better