StackAdapt: 90%+ of marketers use AI, only half trust it to run campaigns alone
The AI Delegation Gap, a new global report from StackAdapt, surveys 500 marketing and advertising professionals across EMEA, North America and APAC alongside 187 StackAdapt customers. It finds that AI adoption in advertising has become widespread, with a large majority of EMEA advertisers using AI in marketing and acting on platform recommendations often or almost always. Confidence in that AI's judgment is thinner: fewer than a quarter of EMEA respondents describe themselves as very confident evaluating whether AI is making the right campaign decisions, and only half say they are comfortable using Autonomous AI. StackAdapt CMO Ryan Nelsen said, "AI adoption is no longer the question. Trust is."
Campaigns built on AI recommendations gain traction fastest when the reasoning behind them is clear and tied to a specific KPI, StackAdapt's data suggests. Marketers keep AI running the day-to-day workflow while keeping a human hand on campaign strategy, acting on recommendations selectively when the rationale is thin. StackAdapt frames the fix as an operating model: governance and confidence-building that let human judgment and AI recommendations work as a team. Nelsen said the companies that build that model will be the ones marketers trust to make bigger calls.