As AI continues to rapidly shift the whole of the marketing industry, keeping track of its evolution and impact on marketing has become a key area of research.

“This is a foundational technological change along the lines of the internet, in that it touches every part of every business,” said our analyst Nate Elliott. “Or, it certainly can and likely will.”

Elliott, who joined EMARKETER in August as principal analyst focused on AI in marketing and commerce, is drawing on what he’s seen going back to the very beginnings of internet marketing. As businesses adopt AI more broadly in their processes, Elliott is keen to see how rapid changes will unfold and how marketers can capitalize on the industry shift.

Tackling transformation

Although there's a lot of pressure to take a broad view of how AI will reshape marketing, there's a need to narrow the focus on the magnitude of AI's business impact, says Elliott. His main focus will entail how AI impacts the customer journey, and he will research the unique needs that consumers have in journeys already being transformed by generative and agentic AI.

“AI will touch almost every internal process and workflow that companies have,” Elliott explained. “And so my job, as I define my research agenda, is to narrow as much as I can this very large topic that could literally encompass anything into the most important pieces for our clients at EMARKETER to know about.”

From there, Elliott’s research expands to how businesses can engage with customers along these new, disrupted journeys.

"I'm most interested in seeing how AI adds to and changes the experiences people are having right now," he said. "There's a lot of talk about how AI might entirely replace some categories and behaviors, but to me it's much more interesting to look at how these tools will make the experiences we already have better and more efficient."

A nose for transformative channels

Throughout his career, Elliott has been at the forefront of researching a number of transformative marketing channels in their early stages, including the rise of internet advertising at DoubleClick, the onset of search marketing at JupiterResearch, the explosion of social media at Forrester, and now the current wave of AI.

What he found as an associate analyst at JupiterResearch was the flexibility to explore emerging digital channels and focus on what was truly transformative in the digital space.

“Search was already very important, so I was contributing five or six search reports per year,” said Elliott. “But social emerged really when I was [at Jupiter]. MySpace was just gaining popularity in 2003, so no one was covering that either, and I wrote one or two social media reports that year.”

He added, “Fast forward another half a decade, and I’m writing nothing but social media reports.”

Comparisons between AI’s adoption and social media’s fall apart pretty quickly, due to AI’s tremendous adoption curve, according to Elliott. He points out that MySpace, at its peak, had 100 million global monthly users. ChatGPT now has about 800 million global users every week.

“The adoption curve has been much steeper,” he said, referring to when ChatGPT 3.5 was released publicly in late 2022. “People forget that it’s still been less than three years since the public had its first chance to use a freely available large language model."

This expansive experience of research at the time of industry transformations elevates Elliott's capacity to forecast the future for marketers. And his work to help advertisers prep for 2026 is already well under way, with new EMARKETER reports about how AI will continue to dominate search and strategies for generative engine optimization.