The data: Marketers are forging ahead with AI tools, but many are neglecting to determine whether this adoption is actually paying off, per a report from Basis.

Roughly 60% of US marketing and advertising professionals use genAI or agentic AI every day—an increase of 33.6% YoY, the report found.

However, just 6.5% use defined metrics and benchmarks to determine ROI of AI investments. About one-quarter measure ROI anecdotally, and 46.2% aren’t measuring ROI at all. The remaining 23.9% aren’t sure whether their teams measure ROI.

What it means: Marketing teams are neglecting critical assessments that determine if AI adoption is warranted. Organizations that don’t measure ROI at all will be unaware of bottlenecks such as poor data quality that prevent them from getting more out of their investments and will have difficulty bridging gaps in AI readiness.

But not all efforts to determine ROI are equally effective. A disorganized, anecdotal approach leaves an organization vulnerable to missing key observations—allowing even issues that have been identified to go unaddressed in the long term. Brands need benchmarks that quantify success or failure so they can be crystal clear when reporting results to CFOs.

Recommendations for marketers: Shift organizational attention to measuring ROI with validated benchmarks.

• Bring all employees into measurement efforts. The more data on what’s working and what isn’t will help illustrate larger ROI patterns.
• Use industry guidance to inform criteria for measuring the success of specific areas of AI adoption. For instance, refer to the IAB’s framework on AI-powered measurement as a template for assessing experiments in agentic media buying.
• Focus on proving ROI for a select group of applications. Pause other experiments, and only once those pilots have been shown to be effective should additional experiments resume.

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