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.
AI became infrastructure
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.”
At GWI, this platform shift showed up in insight generation.
“[GWI's AI insights assistant] Spark condensed hours of analysis into seconds,” said GWI COO Misha Williams, emphasizing that its strength comes from being “grounded in real human data, not web-scraped noise.”
For marketers, AI infrastructure is now table stakes. Leaders are now investing in embedded intelligence, including systems that remove friction, elevate visibility, and free teams for higher-value strategy.
Targeting, suitability, and signal recovery
With the signal environment becoming noisier, and in some cases synthetic, AI became essential to restoring clarity in 2025.
Paul Mandeville, chief product officer at Iridio by RRD, highlighted how foundational rethinking became necessary to stand out.
“We built… our Contextual Advertising targeting engine, which uses LLMs to label hundreds of millions of web URLs… and ‘group’ in virtual space sites that have similar content using virtually unlimited variables," he said. The result is “a precise understanding of what a site or app is saying.”
AtData’s CEO Tom Burke focused on weeding out the opposite problem.
“AI continues to help us filter human behavioral patterns from everything else: botnets, AI agents, recycled identities, and a growing tide of synthetic consumers,” he said.
When it comes to using AI to discovery, geoSurge’s CEO and co-founder Francisco Vigo warned of instability.
“LLMs don’t hold brand knowledge as static facts… representational drift is why brands can quietly disappear from generative engines even when nothing in the real world has changed,” he said.
As platforms evolve, marketers will need AI both for restoring trustworthy signals and actively shaping how brands appear in generative environments.
Creative & content workflows
Across creative teams, AI’s most meaningful impact wasn’t volume, it was flexibility.
"Using AI as a kind of creative sidekick has helped the team ask smarter questions and get to sharper ideas faster,” said Kat Chan, senior director of brand marketing at Duoliingo.
For Steve Miller, senior vice president and executive creative director and partner at Fuse, using AI provided a breakthrough in production.
“We created our first fully AI animated online video… the animation was all AI,” he said. The team still relied on human voiceover, but the workflow itself proved repeatable.
Priya Gill, CMO at Iterable, observed a similar shift in marketing ops.
"One of the best AI use cases I saw this year came alongside the release of Iterable’s MCP server," said Gill. "With MCP, AI doesn’t just answer questions, it can take action. That shift has completely changed the speed and scale at which teams can build, optimize, and analyze campaigns while dramatically reducing their reliance on engineering."
Creative AI is maturing into a hybrid, modular model for marketers: Human concepts, AI scaffolding, rapid iteration, and new workflows that unlock experimentation without linear timelines.
Performance automation hit scale
In 2025, performance automation moved from promising to proven across several platforms.
Pinterest’s vice president of product marketing and product operations Julie Towns highlighted the impact on both user and advertiser experience. For consumers, “our AI-powered ‘taste graph’ now understands billions of signals,” helping Pinterest reach “600 million monthly active users,” she said. For advertisers, “Performance+ campaigns have outperformed traditional setups… often delivering more than a 20% reduction in CPA.”
Marc Grabowski, COO at Integral Ad Science, echoed the shift toward intelligence layered onto automation: “Our approach to AI doesn't just automate, it works alongside customers… transforming complex campaign data… into rigorously informed, data-driven recommendations."
ThriveCart CEO Ismael Wrixen described AI as an equalizer: “Users will soon be able to describe an idea and watch the system generate their checkout flow, course site and email automations end-to-end.”
If the last few years were about experimenting with AI and 2025 was about scaling it, then 2026 will be about re-architecting marketing workflows around agentic systems, cleaner signals, and data foundations that can withstand volatile models.
This article was prepared with the assistance of generative AI tools to support content organization, summarization, and drafting. All AI-generated contributions have been reviewed, fact-checked, and verified for accuracy and originality by EMARKETER editors. Any recommendations reflect EMARKETER’s research and human judgment.
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