Marketers embrace AI for social and retail media, but hold back on automated ad buying
Nearly half of marketers are using AI in social media and retail media campaigns, but few trust the technology to spend their budgets. That's the finding from a survey of more than 100 marketing professionals conducted in the first quarter of 2026.
The divide reveals how marketers are selectively adopting AI: they're comfortable automating analysis and content work, but skeptical about handing control of ad spending to machines.
Where marketers are using AI
Forty-nine percent of marketers report using AI in social media campaigns, while 42% use it in retail media. Within those campaigns, the pattern is consistent.
Two-thirds of social media marketers use AI to analyze results and data. More than half use it to create content (57%) and edit content (54%). The same priorities show up in retail media: 73% use AI for data analysis, 68% for content creation, and 45% for editing.
Marketers are also using AI for adjacent tasks. In retail media, 36% connect off-site and on-platform results for analysis, and 32% use it to hyper-personalize ad visuals.
Meta and TikTok have opened their ad platforms to third-party AI tools and agents, enabling automated campaign management and cross-channel insights. Agencies are using AI for creator discovery, matching campaign briefs with influencers based on historic engagement data.
The budget problem
Only 32% of marketers using AI in their campaigns trust it to buy inventory. That hesitation stands in sharp contrast to the sell side: Walmart and Amazon are embracing agentic solutions for their ad platforms.
Marketers cite concerns about budgets, data management, transparency, and decision-making. At the Programmatic Marketing Summit this month, buyers outlined what they want: human oversight with guardrails.
"I want a person overseeing the bot," said Glenniss Richards, senior director of digital media activation at Bayer. "We do need some guardrails in place to ensure that we are still able to test and learn and scale new opportunities."
Some buyers distinguish between AI assisting with media planning and AI making autonomous buying decisions. Amy Porter, senior vice president and executive director of digital media at RPA, said agentic tools could improve transparency on routine tasks, but risk obscuring critical decisions if advertisers rely too heavily on AI for bidding and optimization without human review.
"The future likely isn't fully autonomous media buying, but instead it could be AI augmenting operational workflows while experienced practitioners remain responsible for strategy, judgment and accountability," Porter said.
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