Marketers are all in on AI. Their customers are not.

Almost every marketing team now uses AI, and the budgets have followed. The people those teams sell to feel very differently about it. The gap between how fast marketers have moved and how their customers feel is the number worth understanding going into 2027.

I have spent close to three years running marketing tests on the major AI platforms, using their most advanced models. The tools get better every few months. The question I hear from clients has changed along with them. It used to be “can AI do this?” Now it is “should we let it?”

Adoption is close to universal

McKinsey’s State of AI report, published in November 2025, found that 88% of organizations use AI regularly in at least one business function, up from 78% a year earlier. The survey drew on 1,993 respondents in 105 countries. Only about a third of those organizations had started to scale AI across the whole business.

Marketing is where a lot of that use lands. In The CMO Survey (run by Duke’s Fuqua School of Business with Deloitte and the American Marketing Association), 73.9% of companies said they use AI in marketing for content creation, the most common use on the list. AI was involved in 24.2% of marketing activities in 2026, up from 13.1% in 2024, and respondents expect that share to reach about 56% within three years.

The money moved, but the budget did not grow

Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey polled 401 marketing leaders between January and March. CMOs said they put an average of 15.3% of their marketing budgets into AI initiatives. Total marketing budgets barely moved: 7.8% of company revenue in 2026 against 7.7% in 2025. The AI money came out of something else.

The same survey shows ambition running well ahead of readiness. Seventy percent of CMOs called becoming an AI leader a critical goal for 2026, while only 30% described their AI readiness as mature or fully developed.

So most teams are spending on AI before they have the people, data and process to use it well. That is how a company ends up with a lot more content and very little to show for it.

Customers are pulling the other way

In March 2026, Gartner published a survey of 1,539 U.S. consumers. Half said they would rather give their business to brands that do not use generative AI in consumer-facing messages, ads and content. Sixty-eight percent said they often wonder whether the content in front of them is real.

Put those numbers next to the marketing figures above. Marketers are producing more AI-assisted content than ever, for an audience that is more suspicious of it every year and that, in many cases, would prefer to buy from someone who doesn’t use it at all.

Emily Weiss, the Gartner analyst behind the consumer research, told brands to make AI optional for customers, to start with uses that help customers in obvious ways, and to label AI-driven experiences. That is good advice. It also confirms the risk is real: careless AI use costs trust, and trust is slow to win back.

What this means for your team

Anyone can produce content with AI now. Very few teams stop to ask whether they should for a given piece. When the ability to produce costs almost nothing, the scarce thing is judgment: knowing which work to hand to a model, which work to keep, and how your customer will react if they find out.

Before your next AI-assisted campaign goes out, ask your team four questions:

• Would our customers care that AI made this?
• Would we be comfortable if they found out?
• Can we check every fact and number in it?
• Is AI saving us time here, or replacing the part customers come to us for?

The teams that come out ahead over the next few years will be the ones whose customers still trust what they read. For most brands, that means publishing less and checking more.