In marketing, an AI delegation gap is emerging, finds new research from AI advertising and orchestration platform StackAdapt.
Having gathered responses from 500 marketing and advertising professionals across North America, EMEA and APAC — with insights from 187 StackAdapt customers — the report surfaced that while marketers feel “increasingly” comfortable using AI tools for tasks with human oversight, professionals are not comfortable with and do not want unchecked automation.
Here, the report outlined that of those surveyed, 90% felt comfortable using AI for recommended actions, with human decision-making as a guardrail, and 89% would use AI to prepare actions, again with human approval. Comparatively, confidence dropped to 78% for AI taking action, with rules set by humans, and even lower, to 50% for AI operating autonomously when performance is approved.
Primarily, the most common use cases emerging for AI included reporting and summaries (77%) and performance analysis and insights (74%). However, a significant percentage (69%) of advertisers are also using AI for creative development.
But Ryan Nelsen, Chief Marketing Officer at StackAdapt, said that the report reveals the conversation around AI is shifting from how marketers utilise AI to how much decision-making authority they're willing to give it.
And here, there was variance depending on job role, with leadership seeing AI delegation as an opportunity and practitioners seeing risk. Indeed, while 58% of strategic decision-makers were comfortable with autonomous AI, this dropped to 34% for hands-on practitioners.
The report observes that this could be due to the latter sitting closer to operational consequences of the implementation of AI in decision-making, and, therefore, placing more emphasis on testing, brand safety constraints and the ability to reverse AI-driven changes.
Further, when the key blockers to AI delegation were ranked, brand risk came out as the biggest concern area at 63%, while data quality concerns followed (56%), with lack of transparency (36%), performance volatility (36%) and poor integration between systems (34%) also raised.
At the same time, 79% shared they feel pressure to increase AI use, and almost 60% said that ambitious leadership expectations may outpace readiness.
Against this backdrop, adoption was found to be consistent across North America (91%), EMEA (90%) and APAC (92%), with 88% reporting it had improved marketing performance.
“As marketers build confidence in AI, they're gaining a clearer understanding of where it creates value and where human judgment remains essential,” said Nelsen, adding: “How those responsibilities are divided will shape the next generation of advertising.”
Nelsen added that the organisations that come out on top won’t be the ones that automate the most, but the ones that define clear “decision boundaries, governance and accountability,” as AI takes on greater authority across advertising workflows.
