The news: Mid-market marketers (companies with 10 to 499 employees) have high expectations for artificial intelligence and see AI as a productivity lever for lean teams, according to new data from WARC and Mailchimp—but adoption lags behind enthusiasm.

• Nearly all (98%) believe AI will improve marketing metrics.
• Only 27% of US mid-market companies say they’ve “widely” adopted AI, compared with 52% for “partial” adoption. Just 35% have fully embedded AI into daily operations.
• Many small and mid-size teams are eager but not yet equipped to scale—39% cite a lack of knowledge or skills as their top barrier.

Developing fluency: Roughly seven in ten mid-market marketers say they’re already using AI in some form, but just over one quarter (26%) admit they’re still unsure how to measure its ROI. One marketer told WARC that AI is “so unknown,” a sign that smaller companies don’t know how best to utilize the technology.

Even as AI becomes a critical part of advertising infrastructure and creative workflows, only 29% of mid-market companies had specialist marketing staff working on customer-facing or internal AI tools—the lowest of any specialty staff category in the survey. Mid-market marketers had much higher staffing for social media specialists, marketing automation, and branding.

Instead, the survey showed that marketers are most familiar with widely available, off-the-shelf AI tools. Fifty-seven percent said they use generative AI, followed by free AI tools (47%) and AI features added to tools that were already in-use (37%). Only 19% said they use a custom, employee-made AI tool.

What this means for marketers: AI is still in its early days, leaving a wide gap between the largest companies with capital to invest in proprietary resources and smaller teams with more limited resources. That will make it difficult for smaller marketing firms to compete with large agencies like the soon-to-merge Omnicom-IPG or tech companies like Meta, which have invested billions into AI tools and are now also aiming for small- to mid-sized brands that make up mid-market companies’ core client base.

Strategic hiring with long-term AI development and fluency in mind will help mid-market marketers gain their footing in the AI landscape and begin to close that gap. But in the meantime, marketers have a difficult decision to weigh: Keep chugging along and slowly gaining fluency, or partner with the largest forces in the industry who can open doors to valuable experience with AI.