Marketers have embraced AI throughout their workflows. Now comes the harder part: Proving its value.
Four years after generative AI entered the mainstream, nearly every marketing and advertising professional now uses the technology daily, and organizations are allocating larger and larger budgets toward building out their AI stacks. As marketers' fluency with the technology deepens, the returns have been real and compounding, with industry professionals reporting meaningful efficiency and performance gains for the third consecutive year.
What hasn't kept pace, however, is measurement. Just 6.5% of marketing organizations evaluate their AI investments against defined benchmarks, even as half of them now deploy autonomous AI agents across reporting, campaign briefs, creative optimization, and media planning. Without those benchmarks, organizations have no reliable way to identify which deployments are working, build the case to scale them, or set the targets that agentic systems need in order to deliver.
Marketing has spent two decades building a culture of accountability around every dollar of media spend. AI is now one of the fastest-growing line items in the business, and one of the hardest to substantiate. And as agentic systems take on more of the work, the organizations best positioned to benefit will be those that can show which deployments are delivering, and scale them with confidence.
To understand what this moment means for the industry, Basis surveyed 184 marketing and advertising professionals from leading agencies and brands, and we used the findings to create our fourth annual AI and the Future of Marketing report.
Select findings from this year's report include:
- AI adoption is effectively universal: 98.4% of marketing and advertising professionals use generative or agentic AI in their work, and 61.4% now use it every day—up from 33.6% last year and just 10.9% in 2023. Only 1.6% don't use AI at all, down from 27.7% three years ago.
- The gains are real, and they're compounding: 75.0% of marketers say AI made them moderately-to-significantly more efficient over the past year, and the share reporting significant gains has climbed every year, from 13.5% in 2024 to 33.2% in 2026.
- Agentic marketing arrived in force: 51.1% of marketing organizations now use AI agents, a 155.5% increase year-over-year. Those agents are running reporting and analytics (72.3%), drafting campaign briefs (56.4%), creating content (45.7%), and planning media (35.1%).
- Nearly half have replaced human tasks with AI: 47.8% of organizations replaced human tasks with AI solutions in the past 12 months, up from 27.9% last year and 10.4% in 2023.
- Measurement is the biggest gap: Just 6.5% of organizations evaluate AI investments against defined metrics and benchmarks, while 65.1% either don't measure AI ROI at all or don't know whether anyone at their organization does.
- The AI platform market has reordered: ChatGPT use fell to 74.5% from 88.6% a year ago, while Anthropic's Claude climbed to 72.3% from 17.9%—turning a one-horse race into a genuine competition.
- First-party data foundations need work: Only 13.0% of marketers describe their organization's first-party data as extensive and well-structured, down from 17.9% last year, even as autonomous systems increasingly depend on the quality of what they run on.
- Risk perception sharpened on every measure: For the first time, half of industry professionals (50.0%) call AI's brand safety and misinformation threat significant. Concern over AI's environmental impact jumped to 81.1% from 63.6%, and 83.7% now believe AI should be regulated.
- Marketers feel secure, but the industry doesn't: 70.0% see little-to-no risk that AI could replace their own job in the next three to five years, even as 50.6% expect substantial job losses across the industry in that same window.
Download the full 2026 report for the complete findings, including year-over-year trend data going back to 2023 and strategic takeaways for marketing leaders navigating an increasingly autonomous future.
