New Research: The State of AI in Marketing 2026

The experimental phase of AI in marketing is over. Over the past few years, teams tested tools, explored use cases, and proved AI can accelerate content production. Now, focus has shifted to operationalizing AI and making it a reliable part of marketing infrastructure.

That shift is reflected in Jasper’s State of AI in Marketing 2026 report, based on a survey of 1,400 marketing professionals across industries, roles, and company sizes. The data suggests adoption is now widespread, but adoption alone is no longer enough to unlock the full potential value of AI.

The real opportunity—and challenge—is strategic implementation. Marketing leaders and teams must determine how they’ll govern AI, integrate it into workflows, and establish the right frameworks for measuring business impact.

Here are eight key trends from the report defining this next phase of AI in marketing, including what high-performing organizations are already doing to succeed.

1. Adoption is universal 

91% of marketing teams now use AI, up from 63% last year. Access to AI has become a baseline expectation, both for employees and talent prospects; 97% of marketers say that having access to AI influences their choice of employer.

Leaders are taking note: 83% of respondents reported their company leaders are committed to AI, and 95% of teams are increasing their AI investment in the year ahead.

However, simply having AI isn’t enough to stay ahead. The advantage comes from integrating it so teams can use it meaningfully and prove out measurable business impact. 

2. Scale is the new priority

In 2026, marketers’ top AI objective is to scale high-quality content. And while idea generation (56%) remains the most common AI use case today, marketers are increasingly using it to generate multi-asset campaigns (51%) designed to span formats and channels.

57% of marketers plan to focus specifically on scaling content production and operations over the next 12 months. There’s a clear shift away from using AI for one-off outputs and toward building repeatable, operational systems that can support complete content pipelines.

In the next year, marketers will also focus on more advanced use cases that lend themselves to impactful, repeatable workflows at scale: improving or increasing personalization and ABM (50%), optimizing content for traditional and AI search (43%), and improving or increasing localization (33%). 

3. Governance is the new blocker to scale

Last year, the main AI challenges marketers faced were related to adoption, including insufficient budget and a lack of internal expertise. Those challenges have diminished significantly over the past year as AI has become the standard. Now, new constraints have emerged around the next levels of AI maturity.

Governance is now the biggest challenge for marketers, who reported a 3.4x year over year increase in blockers from legal, compliance, and brand review processes as AI scales. As content volume grows, so does complexity with managing brand consistency and approval cycles.

AI can generate content quickly, but organizations struggle to operationalize review, risk management, and brand control at the same pace. Marketing teams can no longer operate in isolation. Scaling AI demands closer collaboration with legal, compliance, and brand stakeholders to establish shared guardrails and workflows.

4. ROI is harder to prove, but with higher rewards

Confidence in AI ROI has declined, even as adoption has increased: 41% of marketers say they can confidently prove AI ROI, down from 49% last year. Paradoxical at first glance, this decline is more a reflection of higher expectations for AI’s business impact vs. actual performance issues. 

For example, as AI moves into core workflows and executives are seeing it as a long-term investment, marketers are no longer measuring success by hours saved alone. They are being asked to connect AI to pipeline impact, performance outcomes, and revenue contribution. 

For teams that can do this, the returns are significant: 60% of marketers who track AI ROI report at least 2x return on their investment.

5. Investment is accelerating

Despite challenges around governance and measurement, AI investment continues to grow. 95% of marketers plan to increase AI spending in 2026, and 66% expect to allocate 10% or more of their marketing budget to AI.

The focus is no longer experimentation but on infrastructure. Marketers are seeing AI as a long-term capability, not a short-term approach.

6. The divide between CMOs and individual contributors is growing

As AI is operationalized, a gap is widening between leadership confidence and frontline execution. 61% of CMOs report confidence in AI ROI, compared to just 12% of individual contributors. A similar divide exists between CMOs who believe that AI has increased job satisfaction (85%) vs. ICs who experience that in their roles (56%).

While leadership sees the strategic upside of AI, it’s individual contributors who feel the on-the-ground pressure to meet expectations for AI impact, often without enough direction around workflows, training, or role definitions.

Closing this gap going forward requires clear ownership, structured enablement, and realistic expectations for how AI fits into daily work.

7. AI is reshaping marketing roles

Marketing AI isn’t just impacting task execution but reshaping entire job descriptions. Some of these new responsibilities are related to marketers’ top objective of scale: 1 in 3 marketers now build AI systems or content pipelines as part of their role. Another 1 in 3 are tasked with defining AI strategy, governance, or policies, directly addressing governance as the top challenge impeding scale.

Overall, 65% of marketing organizations say they now have a designated role to manage AI workflows. Plus, in the next 12 months, teams expect to hire for entirely new roles, including:

• AI Search Specialist (40%): Focuses on AEO and GEO strategy and how brand content is visible across AI-powered search and discovery experiences.
• AI Transformation Lead (34%): Owns coordination of AI strategy, change management, and cross-functional execution as AI is embedded into marketing operations.
• AI Architect or Operations (31%): Manage technical foundations of marketing AI, including system reliability, integrations, governance, and scalability.

Even though scale is the top priority, a key role to support content production and operations is underdeveloped: only 19% of teams plan to hire a content engineer in the next 12 months. A content engineer responsible for systems-level content operations could help teams overcome governance and quality challenges.

8. Maturity is the ultimate differentiator

Maturity—not adoption alone—now separates AI leaders from laggards. High-maturity organizations share common traits, like treating content as a system, having long-term operating mindsets, and using domain-specific tools.

Successful teams are not simply using AI more often but more intentionally, aligning it with the needs, goals, and capabilities of their business. As a result, they have:

• Stronger ROI confidence: 61% can show returns vs. 41% of general population
• Increased job satisfaction: 66% say AI has increased job satisfaction vs. 15% of beginner organizations
• Higher leadership commitment: 86% report very committed senior leadership vs. 32% of beginner organizations

Going forward, it’s clear that operational discipline and rigor around implementation and governance are what unlocks AI’s long-term value.

Navigating the operational era of AI

AI now influences the entire marketing lifecycle, from how content is created and adapted to how campaigns are launched, optimized, and evaluated. Operational readiness is the defining factor in how well AI can serve as a sustained advantage for the future. 

In 2026, it’s time to stop considering whether AI belongs in the tech stack and determine if that stack is able to support AI at scale. 

Download the State of AI in Marketing 2026 report to learn how your organization compares to 1,400 of your marketing peers and discover what high-maturity organizations are doing differently.