The rise of AI has put marketers under some serious pressure: Adopt the technology quickly, demonstrate growth and efficiency gains, and stay ahead of a landscape that’s evolving by the day. Easy peasy, right?
Of course, the upside more than justifies the growing pains, with close to two-thirds of marketers reporting that AI has made them moderately-to-significantly more effective over the last year. Still, with new solutions entering the market every day and marketers constantly discovering creative new applications, it’s easy to feel like everyone else is one step ahead.
To that end, here’s a look at where the industry actually stands, and how marketers are finding real value in the technology.
Recent research offers a useful baseline for understanding how AI has taken hold across the marketing industry. Nearly all marketing and advertising professionals (95%) report using generative or agentic AI at least once a month, and a third use it every day. When it comes to what marketers are actually doing with AI tools, the top use cases are ideation and brainstorming, research, and drafting content and creative. ChatGPT dominates as the go-to platform, with Gemini and Copilot rounding out the top three.
On the organizational side, nearly two-thirds of marketers (65.7%) say their companies pay for or subscribe to premium AI tools. However, adoption of more sophisticated, custom in-house solutions remains limited, with nearly half (47.1%) reporting that their organizations don't use any at this time.
Beyond adopting custom tools and achieving the data readiness necessary to fuel those tools, the creative use of AI is increasingly what separates high-performing marketing teams from the rest. Below, Basis experts share a variety of ways they're finding value in the technology across their roles.
“I’ve found AI very useful as a partner to expedite tasks related to writing and communication. A few examples:
Robert Kurtz | Business Outcomes Partner
“I used Copilot to run a basic regression model for performance forecasting based on historical spending and online conversion data. Copilot helped organize and clean the data set, ran the analysis, and summarized findings so that I could interpret and contextualize the data outputs. This was a cool way to expedite data analysis so that I could focus on interpreting the numbers.”
Lauren Johnson | Effectiveness Lead
“One of our clients was receiving some negative responses online after running new, bold creative executions. They asked us for support in what we could see online from a brand sentiment perspective, but we couldn’t find much using our social listening platform. So, we took a handful of social media posts and asked Copilot to summarize sentiment and themes. The tool helped us to quickly understand audience sentiment on social media based on 15 social posts with 600+ comments.”
Emily Zelenz | VP, Integrated Client Solutions
“I’ve found AI particularly useful for keeping up with what competitors are doing in market. One of our clients has a long list of competitors, so I built a prompt that can look for new competitor creative launched within specific time periods. It makes competitive updates in the QBR much more streamlined—previous to this, I’d have to look at each brand one by one in an ad tracking tool and see if any looked new.
On a similar note, I've also given Copilot a list of competitors in a category and asked for a SWOT analysis of each. Individually curated research would be a lot more in-depth and likely more interesting—but leveraging Copilot gave a quick overview in just 2 minutes. That quick intel is a great starting point, and then it's up to us to identify where we need to dive deeper.”
Molly Marshall | Strategic Business Outcomes Partner
“I work with a lot of pharma clients, and the drugs and diseases we look at are often very complicated. I use a custom GPT for disease and drug research that:
I use the output as a starting point for my own understanding, then ask targeted follow-up questions and cross-check key points until I’m confident in the fundamentals and feel comfortable having an educated conversation with my clients.”
Ryan Sperry | VP, Integrated Client Solutions
“One of our clients partnered with a vendor that develops synthetic personas representing key target audiences. The initial output included detailed audience profiles covering demographics, psychographics, media consumption behaviors, and trust metrics.
We are currently in the process of validating those findings against syndicated sources such as GWI and IPSOS, and the early review indicates strong directional alignment.
One area we are exploring as a next step is using these personas to inform creative message testing, in addition to broader audience strategy and planning. We are still in the early stages of evaluating how this could be applied most effectively, but the results so far are both promising and exciting.”
Jackie Etter-Krause | Sr Integrated Client Solutions Director
My team played around with AI to help us determine the best radius targeting for one of our multi-location clients. Copilot analyzed factors like population density, traffic patterns, bridge/toll road barriers, etc., and helped us determine the appropriate radius as well as some exclusions to implement within Meta & Google.”
Marykate Dougherty | VP, Integrated Client Solutions
These use cases are just a snapshot of the ways marketers are finding value in AI, and the list is only growing. Whether pressure testing a media strategy, navigating a PR crisis, or getting up to speed in an unfamiliar vertical, AI has proven itself as a capable and versatile partner across a variety of marketing functions.
Not every application needs to be groundbreaking—some of the most impactful uses are the ones that simply save time, surface better insights, or help advertisers show up more prepared for a client conversation. As the technology continues to evolve, marketers who are actively experimenting today will be best positioned to scale what works tomorrow.
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For more insights on how marketing teams are using AI, we asked professionals from leading brands and agencies about which tools they’re using, where the technology is driving results, and where the challenges still lie. Check out the 2025 AI and the Future of Marketing Report for an inside look at what's actually working.
