Most common ways US marketers use AI are content creation, personalization, and optimizing campaigns

Workflow & automation

Reader Note:: This question was answered by 188 of the 308, who could check every use that applied and named 5.9 each on average, so the shares add up to far more than 100%. Content creation at 73.9% is 139 people, personalization at 65.4% is 123 and campaign optimization at 49.5% is 93. The list runs to seventeen further uses, among them generative engine optimization at 41.5% and conversational AI for customer service at 39.9%. It records where AI is used, not how much of the work it does or how well.
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.

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