Half of Marketers Don't Understand How Consumers Use AI to Shop-and It's Costing Them
A disconnect is widening between how marketers deploy AI and how consumers actually use it. New research from Validity, based on surveys of more than 500 U.S. marketers and 1,000 consumers, shows marketers are scaling AI-driven campaigns while consumers increasingly use AI to filter them out.
The gap starts with basic knowledge. Nearly half of marketers report only limited or basic understanding of how consumers use generative AI for product discovery. Yet 44% expect agentic commerce to meaningfully impact their business within the next 12 months.
Consumers Are Reading AI Summaries, Not Your Emails
More than half of consumers now make purchasing decisions based on AI-generated email summaries alone, without opening the full message. That breaks down to 35% who skip the email entirely, 15% who don't open it, and 5% who delete it based on the summary.
Marketers are increasing email investment anyway. Forty-three percent plan to boost spending this year, even as one in five consumers already decides whether to engage based solely on AI summaries.
The measurement problem compounds the issue. Seventy-four percent of marketers cannot measure when consumers use AI to interact with their campaigns, despite 31% of consumers saying they rely on AI for product research more than they did a year ago.
Trust in AI-Generated Content Is Fragile
Forty percent of consumers say they would trust a retailer's emails less if they knew the content was written by AI. Yet 74% of marketers are already deploying or testing AI-generated content.
Consumer skepticism runs deeper. Only 10% completely trust AI summaries to accurately represent email content. Fifteen percent have already disabled AI email features.
Data Quality Concerns Diverge
Marketers and consumers worry about opposite problems. Twenty-five percent of marketers cite poor internal data quality as a top barrier to AI adoption. The same percentage of consumers point to misuse of personal data as their primary concern about AI marketing.
Validity released its Engage platform to address the marketer side of this equation-a tool designed to help teams identify risks earlier, optimize for deliverability, and measure results more reliably.
For marketers looking to close the gap, understanding consumer behavior around AI has moved from optional to essential. Learn more about AI for Marketing, or explore an AI Learning Path for Marketing Managers to build the measurement and strategy skills this shift demands.
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