State of AI in Marketing 2026 [REPORT]
February 21, 2026
If 2025 was “The AI Inflection Point,” we’re dubbing 2026 “The Operational Era of AI.”
A year ago, many marketers I spoke with were still skeptical of AI. But our new report shows that those days are long gone. Literally every marketer is now using it. The story has shifted towards what happens *after* adoption, when AI moves from experimentation into everyday operations.
A few specific takeaways that illustrate this point:
- AI isn’t creating chaos. It’s exposing it. Teams with clear ownership, governance, and operating models are pulling ahead. Everyone else feels the friction.
- Marketing is where AI success or failure shows up first. It’s the most visible, most scaled, and most scrutinized place AI gets deployed.
- Governance, not budget or talent, is now the biggest blocker to scaling AI. Legal, compliance, and brand review are the new bottlenecks.
- There’s a widening gap between leadership confidence and team experience. CMOs feel good about AI. Individual contributors feel the weight of it. (Oof!)
- And the most surprising one: the teams that are the highest on the AI maturity curve report that their jobs have transformed the most significantly — yet that same cohort also reports the highest levels of job satisfaction and least levels of burnout.
To download full report, CLICK HERE.
