"Across adtech, creative, analytics, and brand strategy, leaders converged around a common shift in 2025: AI is moving from tool to infrastructure, from automation to intelligence, and from assistants to agents that shape decisions in real time. We polled a host of marketing leaders to hear what their top use cases for AI was this year and where they're placing their bets for 2026."
"A defining feature of 2025 was AI's integration beneath the marketing stack, not as an add-on, but as the system itself. "Blueprint is built into the workflow so the platform can take on routine decisions, surface insights faster, and help teams understand what is happening inside a campaign in clearer, more actionable ways," said Yahoo DSP's senior director, head of strategy Joshua John Jr. The benefit wasn't just efficiency. As he noted, "It's taken a real amount of manual lift off the people running campaigns.""
AI became embedded beneath the marketing stack in 2025, operating as the system rather than an add-on. Embedded intelligence removed friction, elevated visibility, automated routine decisions, and freed teams for higher-value strategy. Platforms with built-in workflow intelligence surfaced insights faster and condensed hours of analysis into seconds when grounded in real human data. AI helped restore clarity in a noisier, sometimes synthetic signal environment through contextual targeting and signal recovery. Organizations invested in LLM-based URL labeling, contextual grouping, and agents that shape decisions in real time to improve targeting and suitability.
Read at EMARKETER
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]