90% of companies use AI agents. 6% have them working.
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI-Ready CMO
New research from Martech puts a number on something most marketing leaders already sense.
90.3% of companies report using AI agents.
Only 6.3% have fully integrated them into their marketing stack.
We’ve seen this trend before with genAI. And it just amplifies if we look at the preferences for adoption drivers: enterprises prefer custom-built solutions, while SMBs prefer integration platforms like Make, Zapier, etc. Which basically means, they “hook things together DIY” in plain English, let’s be honest here.
We love these studies because they show trends. But everyone should think twice before accepting the numbers as is. As said, we’ve seen this trend before with genAI. Out of 10 companies, 8 said they used AI in their marketing. But when you look deeper, the “used AI in their marketing” meant a GPT Pro subscription only. At best, because most only chose the free version.
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Don’t know about you, but we wouldn’t call this AI adoption. Maybe AI curiosity, yes, but it’s miles away from AI integration.
Now we have the same trend for AI agents. Out of 10 companies, 9 claim to have agents. Meanwhile, it might mean that they mistakenly call automation agents. Just look at the example tools, n8n, Zapier, and Make, all of which are more like automation tools, less like agentic workflows. Custom-built for enterprise? That’s the same, hand-built for them by expensive Salesforce consultants, probably.
One thing that is clear from studies like this: organizations have structural problems. Most organizations are layering AI onto systems built without agents in mind. The agent needs to know the rules, the customer context, and the appropriate action. In real time, across multiple systems simultaneously. That’s a structural problem to solve, not a knowledge challenge to wing.
It’s architecture. It’s scaffolding. We covered exactly how to build this scaffolding in our free workshop. Give it a watch:
TLDR: solve the structural problem first by reorganizing your workflows with agents in mind. Then deploy the agents to scale your workflows. Agentic workflows are not just automations. They are your new team members, doing your work 0-24, acting autonomously and automatically.
— Torsten and Peter
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3 AI Marketing Tools To Try Today
Make
Make is an AI-enhanced visual automation platform that connects your entire marketing stack through drag-and-drop workflows with conditional logic and API calls. Use it when your automations need branching paths, error handling, and complex multi-step sequences beyond simple triggers.
n8n
n8n is an open-source workflow automation platform with 400+ integrations and AI capabilities for building complex business process automations. Use it as a fully customizable alternative to Zapier for marketing ops teams with specific integration needs.
Gumloop
Gumloop is a no-code AI automation platform that lets you visually chain together AI models, web scrapers, and data tools to build complex workflows. Use it to automate repetitive processes, such as lead enrichment or content pipelines, without writing a single line of code.
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