Affiliate Leaders takes a deeper look into the impact of AI and why marketers are putting blind trust in it when consumers don’t.
AI has been at forefront of discussions in adland for a few years now, but there’s gap emerging between industry adopters and sceptic consumers.
If you’re in marketing, then chances are you’re using AI in some form or another, with as much as 80% now using it for content creation and 75% using it for media production, Hubspot research reveals.
“It’s 2026 we can’t have a presentation without AI,” jokes Jenny Fernandez, head of research and insights, EUI at TikTok.
“Increasingly, we are using insights from AI tools, ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever your tool of choice is, and in quite a short period of time, they have become [one of the] biggest go tos to inform or validate our decisions.”
But, for all the industry confidence, consumers are yet to be convinced. This isn’t just a data privacy issue (although 76% of consumers lack confidence in AI’s data privacy), it’s also about public trust.
Just 38% of consumers feel positively about AI compared to 77% of advertisers, and even well polished AI content is hit with a ‘trust penalty’, with consumers reacting with hesitancy if they sensed a message was written by a machine.
The impact of AI isn’t just limited to strategy or the consumer either, the advertising industry is being directly threatened with UK ad agencies cutting staff at an unprecedented rate.
Research from the IPA has revealed employee numbers have dropped 14% in the last year, with thousands of creatives, primarily junior employees, losing their positions. In fact, employees aged 25 or under have fallen 19.2% year-on-year.
Undoubtedly, AI has and will have foundational impacts on the marketing and advertising industry across all verticals – but is it all too much too soon?
AI efficiency leading to adoption
First things first, adoption. The marketing industry has one of the highest AI adoption rates with the vast majority of professionals choosing to use the technology in their strategies and projects.
The overall sentiment is positive, too, with surveys outlining that over two-thirds (69%) of marketing professionals are excited about AI technology and its impact on their job. That being said, 17% are worried about its impact on their roles, and 31% of marketers have concerns around the accuracy and quality of AI.
It’s unlikely this will change soon, with 70% of marketers expecting AI to play a bigger role in their future work, and 48% saying more AI adoption is a primary goal.
“AI efficiency is a given, and is driving AI tools to be actively implemented across organisations,” says Cathy Taylor, commissioning editor US, WARC Strategy
“But for marketing to get the most out of AI tools, teams need to stay focused on the fundamentals of brand building to deliver effective campaigns. Currently, the c-suite’s conversation around AI remains primarily focused on cost efficiency, speed, and productivity. However, data shows that only chief marketing officers are viewing AI’s value through the lens of effectiveness.”
By nature, AI copies. It cannot produce original work, instead it can make an educated guess on what might come next, or what a human with the same brief may come up with. This viewpoint is reflected elsewhere in the industry, too.
“AI tools without precise data plugged into them will give you the stereotypical expected, sometimes bland or banal view, and sometimes it will just give you an outright incorrect view,” Fernandez explains.
Although in the short-term, it seems that AI is driving marketers out of the profession, in reality, it cannot produce organic ideas – making teams that focus on human output even more valuable.
“Effective CMOs focus on consumers and customer journeys. Brands can use the scale and speed of AI while also tapping into its ability to genuinely optimise creative executions and consumer insights,” says Taylor.
AI to supersede human intelligence?
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s outspoken chief exec, has predicted that AI will soon be responsible for 95% of marketing work, currently carried out by creatives, strategists, and agencies.
“[Around] 95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly and at almost no cost, be handled by the AI — and the AI will likely be able to test the creative against real or synthetic customer focus groups for predicting results and optimising. Again, all free, instant, and nearly perfect. Images, videos, campaign ideas? No problem,” he says.
The issue with this claim is multi-faceted. First, the growing cost of compute and in acquiring the vast datasets needed to train specialised LLMs has significantly weakened the financial case for AI adoption, with Gartner reporting two-thirds of companies, which made AI-driven cuts, are already rehiring.
The second, is this claim (as with many of the claims about AI’s potential) relies on the arrival of artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Many in the tech industry believe this concept – that AI could supersede human intelligence – cannot and will not happen.
Ultimately though, this means turbulence for the marketing industry. There’s a complicated relationship between the industry and AI. It has been widely and swiftly adopted within marketing, but executives are now begrudgingly accepting that “returns are immediate or financial” and that ROI may take years to materialise, Deloitte research shows.
Consumer trust
While marketers are enjoying the AI boom, their customers aren’t so sure.
Research consistently shows that consumers are pushing back against AI, with 78% of audiences wanting clear disclosures for AI-generated content, and 85% believing that artwork is more meaningful when its made by humans.
AI is being used not just to launch campaigns, but also to measure insights, customer behaviour, and preferences – with marketers using the technology to enhance the data they collect.
“AI is a powerful tool, when used responsibly and with human judgement. We all know it can do transformative things for business: improving efficiencies for enterprise brands while levelling the playing field for SMBs,” says Visha Kudhail, global marketing executive & author of Authentic Marketing.
“Yet increasingly we see businesses adopt AI at speed without real strategy. The fundamentals in marketing have long been broken. Poor targeting on digital, traditional workflows requiring excessive manual work, and siloed data that prevents a clear view of the customer. Why not use AI to personalise and scale with the customer in mind, or find ways to remove tedious tasks and reduce burnout? We need to understand the problem and solve that first, instead of adopting AI simply to be seen as an AI company.”
Real-time measurement and optimisation has been a big topic of discussion among advertisers, and live data infrastructure tools that harness AI are used industry-wide.
But, according to research by AI news, 63% of consumers globally don’t trust AI with their data, a figure which rises to 76% in the UK. There is a disconnect between the marketing world, and the audience that advertisers are targeting. More research identifies that 78% consumers want brands to disclose when they’re using AI, or when they have interactions powered by AI.
For consumers, this translates as a transparency concern. To successfully utilise AI in a way that centres the audience, marketers must adopt a fully transparent approach.
As illustrated by the appetite for mandatory AI labelling, consumers are uneasy about it being used without their knowledge, especially in advertising. If AI is clearly disclosed, this builds trust between audiences and brands, developing better brand profiles.
Many marketers and consumers alike are using AI in their daily lives, and it would be unrealistic to suggest that this could be reversed. However, the key consideration with AI in marketing is: what problem are you trying to solve?
Using AI to supplement your original human work or automating for a specific and specialised problem will produce the best results, especially if this is disclosed clearly to the audience.
