Marketing: where the industry stands with AI

Where marketing stands with AI

Marketing in October 2026 uses AI daily to write, design and buy ads, and the ad platforms now run much of the buying themselves. In a July 2026 survey of 681 marketers by Social Media Examiner, a US marketing publisher with a mostly US readership, 73% used AI every day, up from 37% two years earlier. Few can yet show what it returns. The tools now do the routine production, so what a business still pays people for is deciding what to say, approving what the tools do, and keeping the customer relationship.

AI is in ordinary use for two jobs. The first is making things: ad copy, emails, product images and short video. The second is buying: the big ad platforms sell automated formats in which the platform picks the audience, the bid and often the ad itself. Large companies are paying for it out of a budget that is not growing. Gartner's 2026 survey of 401 chief marketing officers, mostly at large firms in North America and Europe, found 15.3% of marketing budgets going to AI, with total budgets flat and only 30% of those officers saying they were ready to use AI at scale (Gartner, May 2026).

Still promise: an agent that runs a campaign from brief to result with nobody checking, and traffic from AI assistants large enough to replace search. Brainlabs, a media agency founded in London, studied its clients' websites: visitors referred by AI assistants converted 1.5 times as well as unpaid search visitors, but made about 200,000 visits a month against about 20 million from search (Digiday, August 2026).

What changed recently

The ad tools started proposing the changes. At Advertising Week in New York on 6 October, Meta said the assistant inside Ads Manager, the tool businesses use to buy Facebook and Instagram ads, now remembers past conversations and reads campaign history; a version that moves budget and targeting on its own is in testing. A week earlier Meta launched Muse for Small Business, an agent that must get the owner's approval before it publishes or spends anything, open in the US and Canada only (Reuters and TechCrunch, 29 September). Our piece Marketing: ad tools now draft the changes and wait for a yes covers what that approval step means for an owner.

Google moved campaigns for advertisers. Through September, Google switched Search campaigns using its broadest keyword setting or automatically written ads into AI Max, where its AI chooses the searches and writes the ads, with no opt-out (Search Engine Land, August). Dynamic Search Ads, campaigns that build headlines from a website's pages, follow from February 2027.

Ads inside ChatGPT became buyable outside the US. ChatGPT ads opened in the UK, Brazil and Mexico on 11 August and in 31 European markets on 24 August, unpersonalized in the EU (Digiday, 13 August; Search Engine Land, 18 August). On 16 September HubSpot, the customer-database software many small companies run, let its users build and pay for ChatGPT ads from inside it (CMSWire, September).

Best practices now

Write down what the tools may do alone. The working pattern is a short rule: which changes the platform's agent may make, up to what spend, and who checks the result each week. Keep the prompts and approvals on file. On 16 September the UK's Advertising Standards Authority ruled against a gambling ad because its AI-generated man looked under 25, the same age rule that applies to an actor; the advertiser's fix was age-specific prompts and records of who generated and approved each image (the law firm CMS, September 2026).

Measure AI referrals as their own channel. Adobe found AI-referred visitors to US retail sites converted 42% better than other traffic by March 2026 (Adobe Analytics, April 2026). The search-click picture is mixed: Seer Interactive, a US search agency, measured click rates on unpaid search results falling 61% on queries showing Google's AI summary between mid-2024 and September 2025, then partly recovering in early 2026 by Seer's own later count. Check your own queries before cutting search work.

Ask the assistants what they say about you. Put your customers' real questions to the main AI assistants and to Google's chat-style search mode, and fix thin or wrong business profiles and reviews where they show.

Label by risk. The Interactive Advertising Bureau, the US online-advertising trade body, published guidelines on 18 August that ask for a label where AI could mislead a customer and warn against labeling everything. In the EU the AI Act's transparency duties for chatbots and realistic fake images or video have applied since 2 August 2026. New York State has required a visible disclosure for AI-generated people in ads since 9 June 2026.

Reprice at renewal. WPP, one of the world's largest agency groups, told investors in August that AI would push its prices down. Ask what in a retainer is still a person's judgment, the argument in Where the Work Goes When AI Makes It Cheap.

What companies are doing

Zalando, the Berlin-based online fashion retailer, said about 90% of the marketing content on its own site was AI-generated by early 2026 (product pages and outside ads excluded), up from almost none a year earlier, and campaign creation fell from six weeks to a few days (Zalando full-year results, reported by FashionUnited, March 2026). That is the work small studios and freelancers used to sell.

Mercado Libre, Latin America's largest online marketplace, launched AI-powered search in Brazil and Mexico in the first quarter of 2026 and told shareholders it raised sales conversion and clicks on sponsored listings; its ad arm also builds ads automatically from sellers' catalogs (Mercado Libre's first-quarter 2026 letter to shareholders). For a seller there, the AI ad tools arrive inside the marketplace first.

The agency groups are splitting. Publicis, the French group, grew revenue 5% in the third quarter, excluding acquisitions and currency swings, and credited demand for its AI-driven media work (Publicis, 13 October). WPP's revenue fell in the first half, and it kept cutting jobs (Marketing Dive, August; Financial Times, 1 September). Omnicom, after buying rival IPG, cut more than 4,000 roles and retired three well-known agency brands, DDB among them (Storyboard18, December 2025).

The tools, by size of business

Corporate. As of October 2026, the platforms' own automated formats (Meta's Advantage+, Google's Performance Max) carry most automated buying. Adobe GenStudio, with Adobe's Firefly image model, lets brand teams produce on-brand variations of an ad at volume; Marketing Dive reported in April 2026 that the big agency groups were standardizing on Adobe's platform. Profound, a US start-up, tracks what AI assistants say about a brand and reported more than 700 large customers in February 2026 (Fortune, February 2026).

Small business. HubSpot now puts email, ads on Google, Meta and ChatGPT, and AI agents in one place. Canva's Grow, updated in June 2026, generates ads and publishes them in bulk to the main social platforms, rolling out first in North America, Australia and the UK. RD Station, Brazilian marketing-automation software, surveyed about 3,000 Brazilian professionals in 2026 and found most companies use AI, mainly to produce content, and only 5% to sort promising buyers from the rest (RD Station, June 2026).

Freelance and solo. General assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) write the drafts. Google's free Pomelli, a test tool, reads a website, builds a brand profile and produces campaign images and video; it opened in more than 170 countries in March 2026 and works in English only. TikTok's free Symphony suite, available since 2024, makes short ad video. No independent survey shows what solo marketers actually pay for; the next update will add it.

What to watch over the next year

Agents that act without asking. Meta's budget-moving assistant is in testing, and Google's move of Dynamic Search Ads into AI Max comes in February 2027. It matters when the feature reaches your own account, or when the first independent result shows whether agent-run spend beats a person's.

Labels applied for you. EU rules require AI tools already on the market to mark their output in machine-readable form from 2 December 2026, and California's rules for large platforms to display such marks start on 1 January 2027 (US state law). As of October 2026, Brazil's AI bill is still before its lower house. Once platforms read the marks, your AI creative may be labeled whether or not you chose to.

Ads inside AI assistants. OpenAI has sold ChatGPT ads through a self-serve manager since July 2026, and Google is testing ads in AI Mode in the US. No independent study of their results exists yet. They matter when one does, and when small budgets can buy in at reasonable cost.