The State of AI in Marketing 2025 Report
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI Ready CMO
We just published our annual State of AI in Marketing report. 25,000 words. 10 chapters. 20+ sources synthesized. Five predictions that’ll shape your 2026 planning.
You can read the whole thing, or spend the next 8 minutes on this executive summary that covers what you actually need to know.
Let’s start with the numbers everyone’s celebrating: 88% of organizations now use AI in marketing. Up from practically zero three years ago. Adoption happened. Vendors won. Everyone’s using the tools.
Now here’s the number nobody’s talking about: only 39% report material business impact.
That’s a fundamental disconnect.
2025 was supposed to be the year AI transformed marketing. Instead, it became the year we learned that buying tools doesn’t equal transformation. It’s the year the gap widened between organizations that restructured around AI capabilities and those that bolted ChatGPT onto existing workflows and called it innovation.
McKinsey’s State of AI report—surveying 1,993 organizations across 105 countries—confirms what we’ve been seeing in practice: AI adoption is nearly universal, but high performance remains rare. Only 6% of organizations achieve what McKinsey calls “high AI performance.”
The separator? Not budget. Not tools. Not even talent.
Infrastructure. Workflow redesign. Organizational transformation.
AI skills turned out to be management skills in disguise. The bottleneck isn’t the technology but our ability to rebuild processes around what AI actually does well versus what it makes worse.
The companies in that 39% didn’t add AI to their stack. They redesigned their operations around AI’s strengths and limitations. They created new roles. They separated execution from judgment. They built systematic oversight.
Everyone else is still trying to make AI fit into 2023 org charts and wondering why nothing fundamental has changed.
Production Became Infinite. Taste Became the Moat.
Content creation stopped being hard in 2025. It became trivially easy.
Marketing teams could generate blog posts in seconds, social captions in bulk, email sequences at scale, landing page variants by the dozen. ChatGPT, Claude, Jasper—the tools got so good that production capacity became functionally unlimited.
And that’s exactly when we discovered the problem.
When everyone can produce infinite content, production stops being valuable. What matters is knowing what’s worth producing. What resonates. What feels authentic. What cuts through the noise instead of adding to it.
We’re calling this the taste gap—the widening distance between what AI can produce and what audiences actually want to engage with.
AI can match technical execution. It cannot—yet—replicate aesthetic judgment, cultural fluency, or the intuitive sense of what will land with a specific audience at a specific moment.
The premium skill in 2026 isn’t prompt engineering. It’s curation. It’s taste. It’s the ability to look at ten AI-generated options and immediately know which one actually works and why the other nine don’t.
As production costs collapsed to near-zero, the value of aesthetic judgment skyrocketed. The marketers who can tell the difference between “technically correct” and “actually compelling” became irreplaceable.
Everyone else became easily replaced.
Search Died. Long Live Search.
Google AI Overviews reached 1 billion people in 2025. ChatGPT crossed 800 million weekly active users. Perplexity launched Comet, an AI-native browser designed for agentic search.
The shift was seismic.
Audiences stopped searching the way they used to. They stopped typing keywords. They started asking questions like they were talking to a colleague. Natural language. Conversational. Context-rich.
And AI answered them—often without the user ever clicking through to a website.
Marketing teams scrambled to understand GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) while their traditional search strategies delivered diminishing returns. The question wasn’t “should we optimize for AI search” anymore. It was “how fast can we pivot before our traffic disappears.”
If your 2026 strategy still assumes Google search works the way it did in 2023, you’re planning for an internet that no longer exists.
The future of search is conversational, agentic, and mediated by AI that synthesizes answers rather than listing links. The brands that figure out how to show up in those AI-generated responses win. Everyone else becomes invisible.
Email Bifurcated Into Winners and Casualties
Gmail’s 0.3% spam complaint policy sounds technical. It’s not. It’s existential.
In 2025, Gmail enforced strict deliverability standards: mandatory one-click unsubscribe, 0.3% maximum spam complaints, and authenticated sending domains. Violate those thresholds and your emails stop reaching inboxes. Period.
Organizations with sophisticated personalization, clean data, and systematic engagement tracking maintained deliverability. They adapted. They invested in infrastructure.
Everyone else—the teams sending generic blasts to purchased lists, relying on batch-and-blast tactics, ignoring engagement metrics—saw inbox collapse.
Email didn’t die. It professionalized.
The era of “spray and pray” ended. What replaced it: infrastructure-dependent precision where AI handles personalization at scale but only for organizations with clean data, segmented audiences, and systematic engagement strategies.
The gap between high-performing email programs and generic ones became a chasm. The teams that treated email as strategic infrastructure thrived. The teams treating it as a cheap traffic channel got filtered into oblivion.
Half the email marketers we talk to don’t realize this shift already happened. They’re still operating like it’s 2022. Their deliverability rates tell a different story.
Organizational Structure Became the Separator
Here’s what McKinsey’s data revealed: Only 6% of organizations achieved high AI performance. The difference between high performers and everyone else wasn’t tools, budget, or talent.
It was infrastructure.
High performers restructured their teams around AI capabilities. They created new roles like “AI Workflow Manager” and “Prompt Engineering Lead.” They built systematic oversight for AI output. They separated execution (which AI handles increasingly well) from strategy and judgment (which humans still own entirely).
Most organizations bolted AI onto existing org charts and wondered why nothing changed.
Chapter 10 of our report breaks down three emerging team structure models:
1. Separated Model: Large enterprises creating distinct “Growth Engineering” and “Brand Stewardship” teams. Execution separates, but leadership must comprehend both domains.
2. Integrated with Clear Swim Lanes: Mid-size companies maintain unified teams but with explicit role boundaries around who owns AI execution versus strategic oversight.
3. Hybrid Leadership Layer: Senior marketers who deeply understand both strategy and AI capabilities become connective tissue, with specialized execution teams below them.
There’s no consensus yet on which model wins long-term. But there’s an absolute consensus that pretending your 2023 org chart still functions in 2026 is strategic malpractice.
The companies transforming aren’t just adopting AI. They’re redesigning how marketing work gets done, who does what, and how value gets created and captured.
Everyone else is using fancier tools to do the same old work. And wondering why their results look the same.
Why This Report Exists
Most AI marketing content falls into two useless categories:
Category 1: Tool tutorials. “10 ChatGPT prompts for social media.” “How to use Midjourney for ads.” Tactical noise that’s outdated before you finish reading it.
Category 2: Sky-is-falling panic. “AI will replace all marketers.” “Your job is obsolete.” Fear-mongering that paralyzes instead of informs.
Neither helps you make better decisions.
This report is different. It’s peer-reviewed by practicing CMOs who are actually implementing this stuff. It synthesizes 20+ authoritative sources—McKinsey, HubSpot, Forrester, Gartner, Edelman—not random Medium posts. It focuses on what actually happened in 2025, not what vendors promised or thought leaders speculated.
Ten chapters covering:
Chapter 1: Content marketing and the taste gap
Chapter 2: Social media and the authenticity crisis
Chapter 3: Search transformation and GEO emergence
Chapter 4: Email infrastructure bifurcation
Chapter 5: Advertising and creative automation
Chapter 6: Marketing operations and workflow redesign
Chapter 7: Agency restructuring and economic models
Chapter 8: Brand visibility in AI-mediated discovery
Chapter 9: Marketing team reorganization patterns
Chapter 10: ROI measurement and value attribution
Plus: A complete timeline of 2025’s major AI releases (DeepSeek-R1, ChatGPT Deep Research, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Sora, Claude 4, Perplexity Comet) and exactly what they meant for marketing teams.
Plus: Five predictions for 2026 based on pattern recognition, not speculation.
Plus: Action plans if you run an agency, lead marketing teams, or shop for AI vendors.
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