Marketers have no difficulty adopting AI. They are struggling to make it work.
An Optimizely survey of more than 2,000 B2B marketers worldwide found that nearly half say AI is fully integrated into their daily work. However, most also spend hours each week fixing AI results, switching between disconnected tools, and compensating for processes that haven’t kept pace with adoption.
The report highlights an operational rather than technological challenge. AI is becoming part of everyday marketing, but the governance, workflows and technology infrastructure needed to support it are still catching up.
The promise of AI was greater efficiency. The reality is more complicated.
Three-quarters of respondents spend at least three hours each week editing, fact-checking or correcting AI-generated content. Hallucinations, manual copying and pasting between disconnected tools, and legal or compliance reviews consume much of that time. Only 4% say AI saves time throughout the entire content creation process.
AI created new jobs instead of eliminating them
The burden appears particularly high outside the US While only 4% of marketers globally say AI saves time at every stage of the content creation process, US marketers expressed significantly greater confidence in AI results. 39% said most AI-generated content is usable without significant changes, compared to 28% globally.
The results show that AI has not so much eliminated work as displaced it. Content generation takes less time, but quality control, governance and coordination require more attention.
Much of this additional work seems tied to the tech stack itself.
Only 19% of respondents use a single integrated AI platform. More than 80% regularly switch between multiple AI applications, creating disjointed workflows that require marketers to manually transfer information between systems.
Fragmented technology is amplifying the problem
These disconnected environments make it more difficult to govern AI consistently. Teams spend more time verifying results, maintaining compliance, and ensuring information remains consistent across systems instead of creating better customer experiences.
The report does not establish that fragmentation directly causes these outcomes, but the findings show that they occur together in all organizations adopting AI.
The survey also found that AI continues to struggle with one of marketing’s core responsibilities: preserving brand identity.
More than half of those surveyed said AI captures real information but fails to capture the emotional tone of their brand. Only about a third expressed great confidence that their AI tools consistently reflect their brand voice.
Brand governance remains a human responsibility
U.S. marketers were more optimistic. Forty-five percent of respondents said they are very confident that AI captures the emotional resonance of their brand, compared to about a third globally. Nonetheless, 62% of US respondents expressed concern that AI is helping give voice to increasingly similar brands.
The concern extends beyond individual content. Fifteen percent of respondents said their AI-generated work would be difficult to distinguish from that of a competitor if the brand were removed, while two-thirds expressed concern that AI is contributing to increasingly similar brand entries.
The findings reinforce that content generation is only one part of the workflow. Maintaining differentiation still depends on editorial oversight, governance and well-managed brand systems.
Leaders and professionals see AI differently
The report also found a notable gap between executives and the people who use AI every day.
More than half of marketers say leadership underestimates the human effort required by AI. C-level respondents were much more likely than analysts to describe themselves as liberated by AI and to say their organization’s implementation is fully aligned.
The investigation also found differences in behavior. 44% of C-level respondents said they often or always submit AI-generated work without disclosing it, while a quarter of marketing leaders admitted to posting AI-generated content they knew was off-brand to meet deadlines. In the United States, this figure rises to one in three.
Rather than highlighting isolated governance failures, the findings show the operational pressure marketers face as AI adoption expands faster than the support processes that surround it.
10x your SEO with Semrush for business.
The most powerful SEO platform in the world, created specifically for businesses.
Request a demonstration
Adoption is no longer a challenge
Perhaps the most surprising finding from the report is that 65% of marketing leaders would consider pausing AI implementation for 90 days to rethink their approach. Only 35% believe the current implementation is on the right track.
As with any vendor-sponsored research, the results reflect marketers’ perceptions rather than independently measured productivity. Even so, they indicate a coherent theme. Marketing organizations have widely adopted AI. The most difficult challenge is building the governance, integrated technology and operating model needed to make AI reliable at scale.
For enterprise marketers, competitive advantage no longer comes from adopting AI. It comes from making it operational.
