According to a survey of 184 marketing and advertising professionals from leading agencies and brands conducted by marketing technology company Basis, marketers are actively promoting the use of AI tools, but many are neglecting to assess whether these investments are truly yielding a return.
The report found that approximately 60% of U.S. marketing and advertising professionals use generative AI or agent AI daily, a 33.6% year-over-year increase. However, only 6.5% of respondents use explicit metrics and benchmarks to measure the return on investment (ROI) of their AI investments.
About a quarter of respondents rely on fragmented experience and individual case studies to assess ROI, 46.2% do not measure ROI at all, and the remaining 23.9% are unsure whether their teams have conducted relevant assessments. This means that marketing teams are neglecting the crucial assessments needed to determine the necessity of adopting AI. Companies that do not measure ROI at all will be unable to detect constraints such as poor data quality, which can hinder them from fully realizing the value of their AI investments and make it more difficult for them to bridge the gap in their AI readiness.
