A new study published this week by advertising technology company Basis reveals a troubling gap in the marketing world: 61.4% of marketing and advertising professionals use AI every day, nearly twice as many as last year, but only 6.5% of organizations measure the return on the technology against defined goals. In other words, the marketing industry is rushing to adopt AI but struggling to prove the investment pays off.
As 2027 budgets take shape, it is time for company leaders to ask a simple question: if AI lets us do more in less time, why aren't we seeing the savings on the bottom line?
A clear promise, a less clear result
The economic promise is clear. Tasks that used to take hours now take minutes, content production has never been easier, advanced data analysis is available to almost every business, and a growing part of campaign management happens automatically. In theory, this is an opportunity to cut costs and improve profitability. But the technology has changed our ability to produce marketing activity, not necessarily the way we manage it.
Take a company that used to publish four professional articles a month. Writing, editing and adapting the content for distribution channels took time and resources. Today, with AI tools, the same company can produce twenty articles in the same period. From the marketing department's point of view, that is an improvement in output. But do the extra articles bring in new customers? Do they strengthen the brand? And has anyone checked whether customers are reading them at all?
If the answers are not clear, the company may not have become more efficient. It has simply learned to produce more content.
The same problem exists in campaign management, social media advertising and automation. The easier technology makes it to carry out tasks, the greater the temptation to do more of them. It is easier to launch another campaign than to stop and ask whether the previous one was needed in the first place.
Activity is not a result
Another study, by consultancy Bain and published at the end of September, illustrates the gap: although 95% of the marketing organizations surveyed have already adopted AI tools, only 6% reported a significant improvement in performance. Those figures should worry any leadership team investing in new systems without defining in advance how their success will be measured.
The problem is not the technology but marketing's old habit of confusing activity with results. The number of posts, impressions, site traffic and even leads may indicate progress, but none of them guarantees the company is making more money.
The questions leadership should ask
This calls for a different view from leadership. A CEO or CFO reviewing the 2027 marketing budget should not settle for asking which AI tools have been deployed. They should ask what happened as a result: has the cost of acquiring a customer gone down? Are marketers spending less time on operational tasks and more on strategy? Is the company generating more revenue relative to its marketing investment?
It is also important to distinguish between types of spending. The fact that producing an ad has become cheaper does not mean the cost of reaching the target audience has fallen. When more companies can easily produce ads and campaigns, competition for consumer attention may actually intensify.
So the goal is not necessarily to cut the marketing budget. In some cases it makes sense to invest the freed-up resources in customer research, new channels or brand building. But that should be a business decision based on goals and measurement, not an automatic result of being able to produce more activity.
Less execution, more strategy
The most important change AI should bring to marketing departments is not the number of tasks that can be completed in a working day. It is in marketing leaders' ability to spend less time on execution and more on questions that used to be pushed aside: who we are selling to, why they should choose us, which channels really work and where the next dollar should go.
A marketing leader who shows a 200% increase in content produced with AI may be proving that their team works faster. A marketing leader who shows how the same technology improved profitability is proving they are a better manager. Technology already makes it possible to do more in less time. Now it remains to decide whether we really need to do more.
The writer is the founder of Ganbaru, which specializes in marketing management and strategy.
