AI Adoption Gaps: Marketers Seeing AI Gains, But Struggling To Scale

Last week I wrote about the apparent gulf growing between “aspiration and execution” when it comes to marketers actually getting the most out of AI.

A separate survey of B2C CMOs has found widespread AI use, but similar gaps between adopters and those actually able to scale.

“While 95% of CMOs report positive returns from AI implementation in commerce media campaigns, only 17% use AI as a foundational capability across their marketing operations,” says the Making Science report, which found more than a third (35%) are “stuck in what the research calls ‘pilot purgatory,’ where AI shows promise in some channels but fails to reach enterprise-wide adoption.”

The most commonly adopted uses of AI are customer segmentation (55%), analytics (51%), and media planning (45%), far above creative tasks such as creative optimization (14%) and content creation (11%).

(Source: Making Science via MediaPost)

“Integration complexity and siloed processes continue to hold CMOs back,” says José Antonio Martínez Aguilar, Making Science’s founder and CEO. “With marketing teams navigating an ever-growing number of channels and formats, the ability to unify creative, media, and data into a cohesive system will be the deciding factor for who truly breaks through and who falls further behind in the competitive landscape.”

More than two-thirds (67%) say AI’s greatest value is in its real-time optimization across all channels, something reiterated by Making Science’s CEO: “The next wave of AI adoption will not be defined by access to tools, but by the ability to coordinate them across channels and teams.”

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