Vendor reportGWI, 2026

44% of marketers used AI-generated insights for audience targeting last year, more than used custom research (31%)

Workflow & automation

44%

share of marketers used AI-generated insights for audience targeting in 2025

Reader Note:: Share of advertisers and marketers who used each source to make audience targeting decisions in the last 12 months. AI-generated insights (44%) are tied with internal customer data (44%) and trail only personal intuition and experience (51%). Social listening was used by 32%, custom research by 31%, subscription-based consumer data by 17%. The data is self-reported by marketer respondents in GWI’s survey; GWI sells audience data, and the report gives no sample size or fieldwork dates for this figure.
Evidence:: Self-reported behaviour
Vendor interest:: Moderate — This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
Sample:: Continuous online survey research among individuals aged 16-64 (or 16+) in 53 markets worldwide; over 1 million respondents annually, with some additional topic-specific GWI studies and a US weekly study used where relevant.

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 never says when this data was collected. It could be considerably older than the publication date suggests.
The source never says how this number was measured.
This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.

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