AI in Marketing 2025: Widespread Adoption, Growing Concerns, and Productivity Gains

As the wave of artificial intelligence is rising, affecting industry after industry, marketing is undoubtedly at the forefront of this transformation. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the integration of AI in marketing processes, we surveyed 1,229 marketers across various functions and company sizes. The results provide a clear image of a rapid development that sooner or later will become inseparable from the functioning of marketers, generation, and planning.

Through our study, we find that AI implementation is transformational at scale, but it is not uniform. AI offers extraordinary opportunities; however, it also raises apprehension about accuracy, creative processes, and employment opportunities. Since the emergence of generative AI applications such as ChatGPT, the current embrace of agentic AI, the survey tracks the ways in which marketers are evolving into this new era.

Marketer profile

The survey captures a diverse range of marketers, reflecting various professional levels and organization sizes.

Around 28.4% of the participants were entry-level marketers, followed by medium-level professionals at 47.6%, senior professionals at 17.1%, C-level executives at 4.4% and at the last is 2.5% of other roles.

Regarding organization size, 43.6% of the respondents represent small businesses with 1-50 employees, 30.1% the size of medium-sized organizations with 51-250 staff, and 26.2% are the representation of large organizations with 251 and above employees.

AI adoption in marketing

The most impressive part is that 89.5% of marketers are already including AI into their processes, emphasizing how widespread this tool has become. This rate of adoption ranges across all levels and the size of organizations, especially the small ones that extensively use it to develop a competitive advantage.

Generative AI dominates the toolkit

Out of all AI technologies currently integrated into marketing, generative AI stands out as the most widely adopted, with 93.5% of marketers being active users of these tools. This is not a surprising figure, given the importance of content creation within marketing alone, and the rise of this specific method in the last few years due to the introduction of social media.

ChatGPT, Jasper, and Copy.ai are some examples that fall under this category. They allow marketers to compose their blog posts, create ad copy, brainstorm campaign ideas, and even create visuals, and in many cases, within a few minutes.

Coming in as the second is data analytics AI. Around 61.9% of the marketers have adopted platforms such as Google Analytics, Tableau, or Looker to help them obtain insights using information on customer behaviour, campaign effectiveness, and web traffic.

In the generative AI sector, ChatGPT is the dominant force since 94.8% of generative AI users say that it is their primary tool. Its user-friendly interface, a set of powerful features, and its cross-disciplinary potential have earned it a place as a ready-to-go resource among both low-level marketing personnel and senior strategists.

Considering the lower adoption levels of alternatives within this heating competition realm, the position of the first mover has earned ChatGPT the well-established advantages that hardly anyone can compete with. Since almost everyone has familiarized themselves with ChatGPT, this model will remain a solid presence in the marketing tech stack in the foreseeable future.

Top use cases for AI in marketing

Generative AI is mainly applied to create content: 82.4% of marketers are utilizing it to write articles, create social media captions, develop creatives, and generate ideas like headlines or taglines. However, that is not their limit, with data analysis, research, and personalization coming very close behind.

Agentic AI: still early, but growing interest

Only 24.3% of marketers have used agentic AI, which is capable of executing marketing campaigns with minimal human input. However, the market has been seeing positive improvement with rising awareness and experimentation.

One in every three (33%) respondents indicates that their organization has already implemented or tried agentic AI, meaning that this movement should be closely observed in the next 12 to 24 months.

Trust and challenges in AI adoption

In spite of its popularity, marketers do not put 100% faith in AI. The blistering rate is that 93.4% of marketers encounter problems regularly with the AI-created content, including errors, bias, or irrelevant results. This resulted in 71.1% of them will never publish any results produced by AI without reviewing or editing them. Still, even though they do not put full trust in AI, only 42.4% are confident that they could recognize AI-generated content. This is definitely a room for improvement: to be more transparent and reliable.

What’s more is that 80.8% of marketers indicate that they have had no formal training by employers on the use of AI tools, indicating a lack of workforce preparedness.

AI’s impact on productivity and outcomes

AI is delivering measurable benefits, with 86% of marketers reporting time savings, averaging 4.74 hours per week. This result aligns with the same findings in a Salesforce 2023 report, where marketers estimate a saving of over 5 hours per week when integrating AI into the workflow.

Job security and AI’s role

Job security issues are arguably the biggest concern of the labor force. Around 88.9% of marketers reckon that AI will cost them jobs in the coming 2-3 years.

A portion of tasks (30.7%) are likely to be automated in the next 2-3 years, which mostly fall under junior roles, making more than 86% of the participants select this position as the most vulnerable to automation. Nevertheless, 62.7% consider AI to be more of a co-pilot than a replacement, and that only 15.8% think AI will entirely replace human beings. On a positive note, 71.9% report having no notion of decline in job security as a result of the use of AI.

The future of AI in marketing

Marketers are bracing for a transformative wave of AI technologies. At the top of the list, 79% expect advanced generative AI, such as improved content creation tools, to have the most significant impact on their work. Predictive analytics (55%) and hyper-personalization (54%) closely follow, reflecting a clear shift toward data-driven strategy and tailored customer experiences. Meanwhile, nearly half (48%) point to the rise of agentic AI. Other areas like AI-powered voice and visual search (37%) and AI-driven influencer marketing (27%) are gaining attention, while only 13% cite ethical AI transparency as a major concern, highlighting a potential gap in prioritizing responsible AI adoption.

Furthermore, 41.7% of them expect their organizations to increase AI investment in the next year, indicating confidence and high trust in its transformative potential.

Conclusion

The survey highlights why AI is becoming a central aspect in marketing. Technologies like agentic AI are in their infancy, whereas generative AI like ChatGPT are taking the lead in the world. Nevertheless, there remain issues: inaccurate results, the absence of training, and the security of jobs, driving the necessity to implement integrated and upskilling strategies.

“AI is helping marketers work faster and smarter, but the real opportunity lies in empowering teams to use it with intention,” said Saul Marquez, Founder and CEO of Outcomes Rocket. “Organizations that pair AI tools with proper training, human oversight, and clear ethical frameworks will lead the next wave of innovation, not just in productivity, but in building more personalized, data-driven, and impactful campaigns.”

As AI becomes more agentic and autonomous, marketers must continue evolving, not by competing with machines, but by mastering how to guide, question, and elevate their output.

Methodology

The survey was conducted in June 2025 using Prolific. There were 1,229 marketers across various industries, roles, and organization sizes participating in this study. The findings provide a cohesive picture of AI’s role in marketing today and its trajectory soon.