Observed Signal · Oct 29, 2026 · Market Signal · Source: DoubleVerify · Impact: 2/5
DV Research: 97% of Marketers Plan to Use AI, but Adoption Across Advertising Workflows Remains Uneven
DoubleVerify released new research showing that 97% of marketers plan to use AI, but adoption across advertising workflows remains uneven.
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Marketers Struggle with AI Confidence Despite Adoption Plans
AdExchanger reports a widening gap between marketers’ plans to adopt AI and their confidence in how it works. A survey of 512 US marketing professionals across agencies and brands shows 87% intend to increase AI usage in the next year, but only 45% feel they understand how AI-powered technologies operate, a 42-point gap indicating early adoption friction. Adoption is strongest in practical areas like email automation, social media management, and chatbot-driven customer engagement, with 72% deploying these AI features, often via tools embedded in existing stacks (HubSpot, Mailchimp) and consumer tools like ChatGPT. Knowledge gaps persist: 47% don’t understand how AI works, and only 39% are confident in their team’s ability to derive useful insights from AI. A majority (54%) can’t confidently measure success against the right business goals. The piece advocates AI literacy, cross-tool integration, and tying AI to performance metrics as paths forward.
Marketers Struggle to Fully Embrace AI Adoption
Supermetric’s “2026 Marketing Data Report,” summarized by MarTech, finds that while leadership is pushing for AI adoption across marketing, most teams remain in experimentation mode. More than 80% of marketers feel pressure to introduce AI, yet only 6% say AI is fully embedded in day‑to‑day operations. The report identifies top-down pressure (leadership and investors), gaps in strategy and training, budget and privacy concerns, limited access to high‑quality data, and small analytics teams as the main barriers. Marketers currently use AI mainly for efficiency and repetitive tasks; broader analytics and decision‑making use cases will require stronger data foundations and investment in analytics capacity.
Marketers Increase AI Use; Technical Skills Lag
Digiday+ Research, based on a survey of 142 brand and agency professionals and interviews with marketing and tech executives, finds marketers’ adoption of AI has climbed sharply (from 44% in 2022 to 86% in 2025) but organizational tech skills, upskilling and strategic use lag behind tool adoption. The report notes many companies favor out-of-the-box AI tools (85% of respondents), while fewer build on existing LLMs (40%) or train proprietary LLMs (19%). Firms have appointed chief AI officers (brands such as General Motors, Mastercard and ZocDoc; agencies including Golin, Luckie & Co. and Horizon Media). Interviewees flagged economic concerns about GPU/TPU infrastructure costs, gaps between baseline user familiarity and advanced internal usage, and growing platform interoperability (e.g., Adobe integrating Google models and Google Vertex AI).
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