Seven in ten marketing organizations already run custom AI agents in production handling real tasks, and 82% expect those agents to make at least a third of routine marketing decisions within two years, according to a new report from Kana. The speed of adoption masks a deeper tension: competitive anxiety, not operational readiness, is driving the investment.
Only 3% of respondents reported no marketing AI use at all. The question executives face is no longer whether to adopt, but how to scale and govern what is already running. The report found that 40% of respondents believe the Chief AI Officer should own agentic marketing strategy and execution. That number rises to 52% among AI leaders. Marketing executives stand apart - they are the only group that leans toward shared ownership or keeping control within the marketing function. Until accountability is clear, agentic marketing initiatives risk stalling in the gap between teams that each assume someone else owns the outcome.
Who owns the AI strategy?
The ownership debate reflects a structural problem. While most leaders point to the CAIO, marketing teams are reluctant to cede control over decisions that directly shape customer experience and revenue. The report notes that this split creates a vacuum where initiatives stall not because of technical failure, but because no single function feels fully responsible for results. The tension is most visible in organizations where AI adoption has outpaced governance design.
The readiness gap
Seventy-six percent of leaders said their governance model is ready for supervised AI decisions, and 86% rated their data infrastructure as ready. Yet those same leaders named data governance readiness and data quality as their second and third biggest obstacles to progress. That gap between self-assessed readiness and production reality is the most telling finding in the data. It suggests that teams are confident in principle but run into friction when agents touch real, messy data pipelines.
The shift toward AI agents and automation in marketing departments is accelerating even as these foundational issues remain unresolved. The report shows that the majority of teams are running agents without a clear playbook for what happens when those agents make a wrong call or amplify bad data.
Competitive anxiety drives investment
The overwhelming driver of investment is fear. Sixty-nine percent of respondents said concern about falling behind peers outweighs every other risk, including security and data privacy. That anxiety is pushing organizations to deploy agents faster than they can build the guardrails to manage them. The report frames this as a bet that speed will compensate for gaps in governance - a bet that will be tested as agent decisions scale.
Why this matters for marketing
Marketing teams are on the front line of this shift. The report makes clear that agents are already handling real work, not just experimental pilots. The next two years will determine whether marketing leaders shape how those agents operate or inherit governance models designed by other functions. For practitioners, the immediate priority is closing the gap between declared readiness and actual data quality, because agents will amplify whatever data they are given. The organizations that solve accountability and data hygiene now will be the ones whose agents make reliable decisions, not just fast ones.
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