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Key Takeaways:
Marketing and advertising teams are increasingly turning to AI to overcome a wide range of constraints, including limited budgets, resources, and time.
To date, the technology appears to be delivering on at least some of its potential, with nearly three-quarters of marketing and advertising professionals saying it has made them moderately to significantly more efficient at their jobs. But while adoption is accelerating, many organizations are still figuring out where AI can deliver the most meaningful impact.
In 2026, the clearest opportunities for AI-driven impact in digital advertising stem from five key areas: creative and content generation, process streamlining, media buying and optimization, media strategy, and campaign measurement.
Tapping into AI for ideation and to generate content and creative assets is one of the most widely adopted use cases in marketing today. A Basis survey found ideation and brainstorming to be the most popular use of AI among advertising and marketing professionals, while drafting content and creative assets ranked third. Teams are applying AI across a range of tasks, from streamlining internal communications to drafting marketing content to producing digital ads.
When it comes to generating ad creative, AI is creating powerful new opportunities to scale personalized creative more efficiently. “Marketers should evaluate their messaging and creative strategies to find where AI can unlock scalable personalization and variation that was previously limited by time and cost,” says April Weeks, Chief Investment and Media Officer at Basis.
That being said, the involvement of human employees remains an important step in developing effective creative and content, with three-quarters of industry professionals believing that AI-generated content does not yet match the standard of human-generated work. AI is best used as a complement to human-led work, helping teams produce more content in less time while enabling more tailored outputs at scale.
Marketing and advertising teams are also widely leveraging AI to streamline complex processes: According to one survey, it’s the fourth most popular use case of generative AI among industry professionals today. As teams look for ways to reduce manual work and improve operational efficiency, close to two-thirds of marketers and advertisers say their organizations have invested in technologies that automate or streamline processes within the past year.
This is a critical piece of an effective AI strategy, as solutions that are tacked on to existing workflows rather than thoughtfully integrated into them will likely exacerbate existing tech stack sprawl. High-performing teams are nearly three times as likely as others are to report that their organizations have completely restructured individual workflows with AI in mind. The shift from tacking on point solutions to rethinking entire workflows is what enables marketing teams to achieve efficiency gains with AI.
Another key consideration is data governance and unification, as fragmented data can be a major barrier to both workflow efficiency and effective AI adoption. Unified, well-governed data not only streamlines the workflows that feed AI tools, but also improves the quality of their outputs. To move towards data readiness, marketers should audit their tech stacks with data unification in mind, seeking out platforms and tools that centralize data sources, enforce consistent governance standards, and create a single source of truth that both their teams and their AI tools can reliably draw from.
AI has long played a role in media buying and optimization, but recent advances are enabling marketers to improve how they allocate and adjust their investments. “We’re moving toward a place where buyers will be able to move much more quickly, because AI will be surfacing data signals and insights faster and accelerating tasks like predictive optimization and forecasting,” says Weeks.
Already, AI-powered tools can process dozens of real-time signals to inform bidding decisions and shift budget across channels as performance evolves. This allows teams to respond more quickly and drive ROI by making more informed adjustments over the course of a campaign. AI also enables more advanced audience targeting, helping marketers surface overlooked segments and uncover new audiences via approaches like building synthetic audience personas.
Personalization at scale—a persistent challenge in media strategy—is another area where AI is opening new doors. Studies show that 71% of customers expect personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when they don’t happen. And when applied effectively, AI-driven personalization has been shown to improve customer satisfaction by 15% to 20%, drive revenue increases of 5% to 8%, and lower the cost to serve by up to 30%.
Adoption, however, has not kept pace. Only one-third of marketers are using predictive AI for media buying and planning, while roughly a quarter are applying generative AI in this area. That gap between potential and adoption represents a clear competitive opportunity. To capitalize, advertisers should ensure they’re using advertising platforms that offer AI-enhanced media buying and optimization, prioritizing those that have these tools integrated into their core workflows.
For advertisers eager to achieve meaningful differentiation with AI, media strategy presents significant opportunities.
Over half of businesses cite shifting consumer preferences as their top challenge. Yet only around one quarter of marketers say they are using AI as part of their media strategy development process.
AI can help marketers better keep up with these shifts by enabling deeper, faster insights.
“AI is creating new opportunities for media strategists to synthesize large volumes of data and uncover insights more efficiently and comprehensively,” says Weeks. “It can take tasks that were once highly manual for advertisers and execute them faster, using a broader set of data.”
Most current use cases for AI across media strategy fall into three core areas:
Together, these capabilities can help marketers better understand their customers and inform a more effective media strategy. Emerging tools are also beginning to extend beyond insights into execution. For example, there are now AI solutions that can turn media briefs into full omnichannel media strategies spanning both the open web and walled gardens, helping agencies and in-house teams reduce manual planning work and move more quickly from strategy to activation.
Campaign measurement remains an under-utilized AI use case poised to become central in the years ahead.
AI excels at parsing, organizing, and analyzing large data sets, and many marketing and advertising teams today are swimming in more campaign data than they can effectively use. Because of the fragmentation of that data, marketers are often weighed down by the manual processes necessary to unify data across platforms, structure it for analysis, and extract meaningful insights in a timely manner. AI can help streamline that workflow, making it faster and more scalable.
AI can also assist with tasks like running regression analyses for performance forecasting based on historical spend and conversion data, helping teams move from raw data to actionable insight more efficiently.
“As AI becomes more embedded in marketers’ workflows, it will increasingly shape how teams approach reporting, insights, and analytics,” says Weeks. “That shift is already underway, but adoption and maturity vary widely across organizations.”
What will separate the agencies and brands who effectively adopt AI from those who don’t? According to Weeks, the companies that succeed will be those who lean into AI and understand the importance of data governance and data hygiene.
In addition to prioritizing data readiness, marketing and advertising teams that thoughtfully implement AI across content generation, process streamlining, media buying, strategy, and measurement will be better positioned to move faster, make smarter decisions, and focus their human talent on the work that matters most.
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Want more insights into how AI is reshaping digital advertising strategy? We surveyed marketing and advertising professionals from top agencies and brands to understand how they are adopting AI, where they are seeing results, and more. Check out AI and the Future of Marketing for all the top takeaways.