Observed Signal · Dec 3, 2025 · Survey · Source: AdExchanger · Impact: 3/5 · Sentiment: Neutral
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.
Industry-wide AI adoption challenges and literacy gaps among US marketers; signals significant impact on AdTech workflows and measurement.
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Key Takeaways & Evidence Grounding
- 87% of US advertisers plan to increase AI usage over the next 12 months.
- 45% feel confident in understanding how AI-powered technologies work.
- 512 US marketing professionals across agencies and brands were surveyed.
- 72% are deploying AI in email automation, social media management, and chatbot engagement.
- 54% can’t confidently say they are measuring success against the right business goals.
Connected Companies & Entities
3 Entities mappedRelated Market Signals & Shifts
Recent verified developments and strategic activity across this market segment.
AI Saves Time, Marketers Spend It Fixing Output
An Optimizely survey of more than 2,000 B2B marketers finds widespread AI adoption but significant operational friction: nearly half say AI is integrated into daily work, yet three-quarters spend at least three hours weekly editing, fact-checking, or fixing AI-generated content. Only 19% use a single integrated AI platform while over 80% regularly switch among multiple AI applications, creating disconnected workflows that increase governance, compliance, and quality-control work. U.S. marketers report higher confidence in AI outputs than global peers, but many respondents worry AI is flattening brand voice. The report — vendor-sponsored research published on MarTech (owned by Semrush) — concludes the industry’s competitive edge will come from operationalizing AI (governance, integrated tech, and workflows) rather than simple adoption.
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).
Marketers See AI Benefits; Trust Limits Agentic AI
Digiday+ Research (excerpt) summarizes a survey of 142 brand and agency professionals (conducted Q4 2025) showing widespread embedding of AI across marketing workflows but persistent barriers to broader adoption. Generative AI has higher adoption than predictive AI, with generative tools most used for creative production (82%), marketing (81%) and external/internal communications (75%/56%). Predictive AI is most commonly applied to measurement and KPI analysis (48%). More than half of respondents (54%) said their companies do not use agentic AI; interviewees and case studies (Unilever, Kroger, Monks) illustrate benefits but highlight trust, governance, data access and technical complexity as obstacles to agentic AI adoption.
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