Canva’s State of Marketing and AI Report 2026 puts a number on the industry’s current mood: 97% of marketing leaders say they use AI in daily creative work, and 99% plan to increase AI investment this year. The audience, meanwhile, is not exactly clapping.
According to the same report, 78% of consumers would rather see ads made by people “even if AI could produce better ones,” and 87% say the best advertising still needs a human touch. The survey base: 1,415 marketing leaders at organizations with 500+ employees and 3,547 consumers across seven countries, per Canva.
Consumers aren’t just expressing a general unease; they’re handing over a requirements doc. Asked what would make AI in advertising more comfortable, 53% cited data protection, 52% want disclosure of AI use, 39% want assurance AI isn’t replacing jobs, and 37% want the ability to opt out of AI-generated ads entirely. There’s also a verification problem forming: 70% of consumers think it will eventually be impossible to tell whether an ad was AI-generated without disclosure, and 56% believe that point arrives within two to five years.
Meanwhile, “AI slop” is no longer just a vague complaint. The report says mentions of the term rose ninefold in media monitoring data, and 41% of marketing leaders call it a considerable challenge.
Canva didn’t publish this in a vacuum. The report arrived alongside an expanded partnership with Anthropic, integrating Canva’s design engine into Claude for Small Business so users can generate on-brand campaigns directly inside Claude, pulling fonts, colors, and identity from a Canva Brand Kit. The Canva-Anthropic partnership had already seen usage grow fourfold in March 2026 after a January expansion that made Claude the first AI assistant capable of generating “on-brand designs” from a prompt. The new integration extends that workflow into a broader business tool stack including QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, DocuSign, and Google Workspace.
The report also notes that 68% of marketing leaders say AI has increased “marketing-influenced business decisions” — which is another way of saying AI is creeping from production into budgeting and measurement, right as consumers start asking for disclosure labels and opt-out buttons.
Read more at The Next Web.