97% of Marketers Plan to Use AI in Ads. Few Actually Do Yet

Ad verification firm DoubleVerify published its 2026 Global Insights Report, "Beyond the Hype: The Real State of AI in Digital Advertising," on November 6, drawing on a survey of more than 2,000 marketers worldwide plus DV's own platform data. The headline number is striking: 97% of marketers say they plan to use AI across some part of media planning, buying, or optimization in 2026. Trade coverage from PPC Land and MarTech Series both confirmed the same finding from the report, and the detail underneath the headline is what matters most if you're running a smaller shop without a research team of your own. For agencies that already treat custom software integrations as part of how they deliver client work, this report is a useful benchmark for where that investment actually pays off versus where it's still mostly talk.

The Gap Between Intent and Daily Use

Nearly every marketer DoubleVerify surveyed says AI is on the roadmap somewhere. But when the report breaks that intent down by specific task, utilization drops hard. AI adoption for summarizing media briefs rose from 28% in 2024 to 37% in 2025, with 2026 usage expected to land around 40%. Mid-flight campaign optimization, adjusting a live campaign while it runs, moved from 21% in 2024 to 31% in 2025, projected to reach about 36% in 2026. Both are real gains year over year, but neither is close to the 97% headline figure. The report also found marketers still spend roughly 10 hours a week on manual optimization tasks that AI tooling is supposed to be handling.

A 97% intent rate paired with sub-40% task-level adoption is not a contradiction — it is the actual state of AI rollout in advertising right now, and it's a gap most clients don't see until someone points it out.

Where AI Is Actually Delivering

The report isn't all gap and no payoff. Among marketers who have adopted AI-powered bidding solutions specifically, 98% reported measurable performance improvements. That's a meaningful signal: where AI has been deployed against a narrow, well-defined task like bid optimization, the results show up quickly and clearly, rather than as a blanket replacement for judgment across an entire media plan.

What This Means for Smaller Agencies

Three things are worth taking from this report if you're advising clients on marketing operations, not just running ads yourself.

• "We use AI" is no longer a differentiator. With 97% of marketers claiming AI intent, a vague AI claim in a pitch deck now signals less, not more. Clients are starting to ask which specific tasks AI handles in your workflow and what the measured result was.
• Narrow AI claims beat broad ones. The 98% performance-improvement figure only held for a specific use case, automated bidding. If you can point to one or two concrete workflows where AI measurably improved a client outcome, that's more credible than claiming AI across the board.
• The 10-hours-a-week manual gap is an opening. If your team or your client's internal marketing team is still spending a full workday a week on manual optimization, that's a specific, fixable problem worth naming in a proposal rather than a generic "let's add AI" pitch.

What To Do With This

Before your next client conversation about AI, pull together a short list of which of your own workflows actually use AI today versus which ones you've only discussed adding. Being specific about both columns, what's running now and what's still aspirational, puts you ahead of most of the market DoubleVerify just surveyed. If part of that roadmap involves integrating AI tooling into a client's existing marketing or reporting stack, that's exactly the kind of scoped technical work worth bringing in outside help for rather than guessing at internally.

If you want help thinking through where AI tooling actually fits your team's workflow versus where it would just add noise, book a free consultation and we'll walk through it with you.