Category: Research and data
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AI Is Becoming Loyalty’s Gatekeeper
Gale’s latest loyalty report is less about points and more about the chatbot now standing between a brand and the person it insists on calling a “relationship.” In “The Preference Economy,” Gale surveyed 3,000 consumers in the U.S. and U.K. and found that 56% are comfortable delegating all communications with a brand through AI. Nearly…
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MIT Tests AI Fake-News Help, Finds a Withdrawal Symptom
MIT Media Lab researchers ran a four-week experiment with 67 participants, asking them to judge whether news headlines and images were real or fake — sometimes with an AI chatbot helping, sometimes not. With AI assistance, participants were 21% more accurate at spotting misinformation. The catch is that the “help” appeared to come with strings:…
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Your Employees Are Using AI. They’re Just Not Telling You How.
A 31-year-old physician was using DoximityGPT — HIPAA-compliant and organization-approved — with a personal prompting template he said produced “astoundingly good results.” His colleagues were struggling with the same tool, and he believed the template would help. He still didn’t share it. The anecdote lands because it is so banal: nothing clandestine, nothing technically fancy,…
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Gen Z Keeps Using GenAI — And Gets Madder About It Anyway
Gallup’s latest “Voices of Gen Z” survey, conducted Feb. 24–March 4, 2026, with 1,572 U.S. 14- to 29-year-olds, sketches an audience marketers love to label “AI native,” then immediately complicates the label. Usage is steady: 51% of U.S. Gen Z say they use generative AI daily (22%) or weekly (29%). But the emotional weather has…
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Canva’s AI Report Says Marketers Are Using It Daily. Consumers Would Like a Label.
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…
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Ipsos Tested AI Ads Against Human Ones. Viewers Mostly Shrugged.
Ipsos set up a tidy little test for generative video: take 20 :30 ads from major brands, show them to 3,000 U.S. consumers in a distracted, “real feed” viewing environment via Ipsos Creative|Spark, and see whether AI-made work can hang with the human stuff. Half the ads were human-created originals; the other half were generated…
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AI Citations, Demystified: The Robots Have Apparently Discovered SEO
Cyrus Shepard, founder of Zyppy SEO, went spelunking through 54 experiments, patents, and case studies and came back with a ranked list of 23 factors correlated with getting cited by AI search engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. The headline takeaway is unsexy on purpose: the top factors are URL accessibility, scoring 9.5, and plain…
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Marketers Keep Buying AI. The Skills Part Is Still Loading.
Digiday+ Research’s latest report, based on a survey of 142 brand and agency professionals plus interviews, shows AI investment moving from “nice-to-have” to “budget line item someone now has to explain.” Marketers reporting company investment in AI rose from 44% in 2022 to 57% in 2023, 71% in 2024, and 86% in 2025. The org…
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Behind the A.I. Boom, a Boring Business Is Soaring With Better Ads
DribbleUp, a sports equipment company, says it used to spend its own time and resources figuring out whom to target on Facebook. For the last two years, it has placed those ads “entirely through Facebook’s artificial intelligence tools,” according to The New York Times. Since then, the company says sales have outpaced marketing expenses. It…
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Gen Z’s AI Habit Is Mostly a Phone Habit
Publicis’ Epsilon unit has a new readout in its “The Consumer State Of AI” report, and the headline is familiar: ChatGPT has the biggest overall share of the consumer LLM market. The more useful wrinkle is the generational split. OpenAI’s ChatGPT indexes even higher with younger cohorts, followed by Google’s Gemini and Google Assistant, according…
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Nearly 80% Of Businesses Struggle To Measure AI Search Impact
Branch’s new enterprise benchmark data suggests AI-driven discovery is no longer a side quest: 26% of companies say AI search delivered more than half their site traffic in 2025, and 49% expect to cross that threshold by late 2026. AI search’s share of traffic is rising faster than traditional search (up from 35% to 50%),…
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Brands May Actually Benefit From Advertising Next to AI Content, Per Study
A new study from OM Media Trials (Omnicom Media’s research unit) and brand safety vendor Zefr suggests the panic around ads appearing next to AI-generated content needs a little nuance. They surveyed nearly 5,000 people in the U.S. and Canada, testing reactions to ads placed after eight types of AI-generated video. The headline: some AI…
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AI Is the New “What Should I Watch?” Button
Nielsen/Gracenote surveyed 4,003 U.S. AI chatbot users (ages 13–79) and found chatbots are now edging out streaming-service recommendation rails as the go-to source for what to watch. Usage is accelerating across the board: 66% say they’ve increased chatbot use in the last 12–18 months, jumping to 80% for Gen Alpha—and more than half of Gen…
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Google: AI ads driving up to 80% sales lift for some brands
Google’s message is basically: AI didn’t kill search, it just made it chattier—and ads are coming along for the ride. Alphabet cleared $400B in revenue in 2025, with Q4 ad revenue at $82.28B (+13.5% YoY) and YouTube ads at $11.38B (about +9% YoY). So despite the “AI chatbots will eat search” anxiety, Google’s ad engine…
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The $31.5% Question: When Does “AI” Need a Label?
AI disclosure in ads sounds simple until you start counting what qualifies: a generated background, a synthesized soundtrack, a digital human, a product demo that never happened. That nuance matters because labeling isn’t just a legal checkbox—it can be a performance tax. Research from NYU Stern and Emory University suggests AI disclosure can cut ad…
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AI adoption rises at work, but leaders use it most frequently
A new Gallup poll (via Axios) suggests the internal AI adoption curve has a familiar shape: leadership first, everyone else squinting at the change log. Even as companies debate whether to mandate AI or let employees experiment, the people at the top are the ones reaching for it most often—at least in organizations where AI…
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Gen AI Boosts Productivity, But Can’t Turn Novices Into Experts
Harvard Business School’s Iavor Bojinov and Edward McFowland III set out to test the workplace vibe we’ve all felt lately: “AI makes you feel like you can do anything. But can you do [a task] as well as people whose job it is?” In an experiment with 78 employees at IG Group, they looked at…
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AI brain fry: What marketers need to know
That wiped-out feeling after “saving time” with AI now has a label: AI brain fry—mental fatigue that comes from using and, more importantly, babysitting AI tools past your cognitive limit. Research cited from Boston Consulting Group and UC Riverside (published via Harvard Business Review) surveyed 1,488 full-time US workers: 14% reported AI brain fry overall,…
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Agentic ad buying has moved from niche topic to top-tier anxiety for media planners
Agentic ad buying has officially graduated from niche curiosity to boardroom concern. In the IAB’s January 2026 Outlook Study, 40% of US ad buyers said that getting their arms around agentic ad buying and how campaigns actually get executed is one of their top worries for 2026—ranking right up there with the usual macro and…
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America’s AI Mood: Heavy Use, Light Trust
A new Quinnipiac University poll says Americans are bringing AI into the daily routine—research, writing, school/work projects, and data analysis—but they’re keeping one hand on the eject button. Among nearly 1,400 respondents, 76% say they trust AI “rarely” or “only sometimes,” while just 21% trust it “most” or “almost all of the time.” Adoption is…
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AI Agents: Plenty of Autopilot, Not Enough Seatbelts
MIT and a stack of academic collaborators reviewed documentation for 30 widely used “agentic” AI systems. TLDR: a lot of capability, not a lot of paperwork. Across eight disclosure categories, most systems provide little to no public detail on risks, safety testing, or governance. The gaps are basic. In many cases, it’s unclear whether you…
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Claude as a Timeclock: What 100,000 Chats Say About Productivity
Anthropic ran a privacy-preserving analysis of 100,000 real Claude.ai conversations to estimate how long people’s tasks would take with vs. without AI help. Claude’s own scoring says the typical task would take about 90 minutes unassisted, and that using Claude cuts completion time by roughly 80% on average. They also mapped tasks to O*NET occupations…
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Fembots, Football & Funny: What Viewers Want From Super Bowl Ads
Turns out Super Bowl viewers mostly want to laugh—with or without the help of an algorithm. A recent Harris Poll for Ad Age found that 71% of consumers are craving funny ads during this year’s Big Game, and humor is also what sticks, with 46% saying they’re most likely to remember a funny spot. Agencies…
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YouTube Tops Reddit in AI’s New Citation Economy
Turns out LLMs don’t care if you have followers—they just want your transcripts. YouTube has leapfrogged Reddit to become the leading social source cited in AI-generated search results, according to new data from Bluefish, Emberos, Goodie AI, and Profound. That’s a sharp contrast from just months ago, when Reddit was still dominating AI responses thanks…
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Brands Trust AI More Than Gen Z Does—And It’s Showing
AI is now a staple in the ad toolkit, but don’t assume younger consumers are thrilled about it. According to new data from IAB and Sonata Insights, 82% of ad execs believe Gen Z and Millennials feel upbeat about AI-generated ads. In reality? Only 45% do—down from 2024—and negative sentiment among Gen Z has nearly…
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Study Reveals AI-Only Ads Boost Engagement Over Hybrid Approaches
This one is going to be maybe a little controversial, or at least news that humans don’t want to hear. A joint study from NYU and Emory University has delivered a sharp rebuke to the idea that humans and AI make better creatives together. After testing GenAI ads across more than 100,000 impressions, the researchers…
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Smart Shelves and Smarter Spend: Retail’s AI Budget Boom
Retailers and CPG companies are no longer dabbling in AI—they’re bankrolling it. NVIDIA’s latest survey shows that 90% of industry leaders plan to hike their AI budgets in 2026, focusing heavily on open-source tools and agentic AI. Why? Because AI isn’t just handling analytics; it’s pulling serious weight in supply chain forecasting, customer personalization, and…
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Slop and Scroll: AI Filler Takes Over YouTube’s First Impressions
A new study from video-editing company Kapwing shows just how aggressively low-effort AI content—dubbed “AI slop”—is worming its way into YouTube’s recommendation engine. More than one in five videos served to new users falls into this category, which includes content created purely to rake in views with low production values and zero narrative. Among 15,000…
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AI Adoption Gap Between Executives and Employees
A new BambooHR survey of 1,500+ U.S. salaried employees shows the AI divide between executives and employees is more Grand Canyon than puddle. While 72% of VP-level execs use AI tools daily, only 18% of individual contributors (ICs) do the same. The gap isn’t just in adoption—it’s in values and perceptions. Execs see AI-generated work…
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AI in Advertising: Consumer Reactions and Emotional Engagement
System1’s deep dive into generative AI advertising reveals something pundits love to debate but consumers don’t appear to care about: whether or not AI made the ad. In testing 18 AI-generated spots across three countries and 2,700 viewers, ads created with machine help actually outperformed traditional ones on emotional engagement, scoring 3.4 Stars against a…
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CMOs Find Their AI Groove—And Use It Weekly
According to a new report from Dentsu Creative, over 80% of senior marketing leaders are now using AI tools on a weekly basis to bang out copy, surface trends, test ideas, and even summarize insights they’d rather not read themselves. Based on responses from 1,950 global CMOs and senior marketers, the findings signal that AI…
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How AI is Shaping Ecommerce for the Holidays
Holiday e-commerce in the U.S. is expected to climb 5.3% this year, and for the first time, retailers are writing AI into their seasonal strategies. Instead of relying solely on Google, consumers are increasingly using ChatGPT and similar platforms to research and compare products. ChatGPT’s own shopping integration, backed by Walmart, Shopify, and Etsy, signals…
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ChatGPT Sends Shoppers, But They’re Leaving Their Carts Behind
A new study from German researchers is poking a few holes in the hype around AI-powered shopping. Analyzing more than 50k ChatGPT referrals vs. 164 million traditional transactions across nearly 1,000 e-commerce sites, they found that while ChatGPT may be driving fresh traffic, it’s not delivering at checkout. Conversion rates from ChatGPT referrals lagged behind…
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Why Your SEO Strategy Needs to Embrace AI and GEO
WPP’s chief AI officer Daniel Hulme makes a compelling case: SEO may not be dead, but it’s no longer the sun around which brand visibility orbits. As chatbots and personal AIs take charge of shopping behaviors, traditional keyword-centric strategies are losing relevance. Instead, we’re stepping into the era of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), where a…
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Assessing GPT-5’s Performance: AI vs Human Capabilities
OpenAI has put its latest models through a new workplace stress test called GDPval, designed to see how they stack up against real human professionals across 44 job types in nine heavyweight industries like finance, healthcare, and manufacturing. In short: GPT-5-high, the premium version of the upcoming model, tied or beat human-generated work 40.6% of…
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AI Gets a Side-Eye: Most Americans Want Tools, Not Takeover
A new Pew survey of over 5,000 U.S. adults reveals that Americans are cautiously circling the AI buffet—happy to try the data salad, but skipping the emotional entrees. Nearly three-quarters are open to AI helping with daily tasks, but two-thirds want more say in how it shows up in their lives. And when it comes…