Nearly every marketing professional at a major cybersecurity conference today has a corporate-paid subscription to a generative AI platform. That is the central finding of a new survey published on April 13, 2026, by ProGEO.ai, a San Francisco-based generative engine optimization agency. The survey, called the AI Marketing Maturity (AIMM) Index, polled 112 marketing professionals at RSAC - the world's largest cybersecurity conference, which reports nearly 44,000 attendees and 600 exhibitors. What the data reveals is not just strong adoption, but a widening structural gap between how much marketers rely on these tools and how well their organizations govern that reliance.

GenAI reaches near-universal adoption in enterprise marketing

According to the AIMM Index, 91.1% of survey respondents - 102 out of 112 - hold a corporate-paid subscription to at least one generative AI platform. That figure situates the cybersecurity marketing community at near-universal adoption. But the distribution of those subscriptions is as telling as the headline number.

Nearly half of respondents (49.1%) carry subscriptions to multiple enterprise GenAI platforms simultaneously. The market, in other words, is not consolidating around a single tool. According to the survey, 42% of respondents use one platform, 26.8% use two, 17.8% use three, and 4.5% use four. The remainder - 8.9% - report no corporate subscription at all.

The competitive picture between platforms is notably close. According to the survey data, 66 respondents reported a corporate-paid subscription to ChatGPT, while 56 indicated subscriptions to Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant. Gemini, Google's offering, was reported by 36 respondents, with Microsoft Copilot following at 21. The gap between ChatGPT and Claude is smaller than many industry observers might expect. When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, according to the AIMM Index, it reached one million users in its first week. The ProGEO.ai report notes that Anthropic gained serious traction in the enterprise after launching Claude Code in February 2025, describing the move as having "presented serious competition for OpenAI." The competitive dynamics between ChatGPT and Claude had already shifted markedly by January 2026, when Similarweb data showed Claude gaining measurably on ChatGPT's user base.

Personal subscriptions tell a different story. According to the AIMM Index, 57.1% of respondents pay for a GenAI platform out of pocket - with 40 indicating personal ChatGPT subscriptions and 33 indicating Claude. The remaining 42.9% have no personal subscription. The report flags a particular risk in this pattern. Marketing professionals who use personal accounts for work tasks represent what the survey calls "Shadow AI" - unmanaged accounts that fall outside corporate visibility and control.

The governance gap

The most structurally significant finding in the AIMM Index concerns not usage, but enforcement.

According to the survey, 76.8% of respondents - 86 out of 112 - report that their organization has a formal corporate usage policy for generative AI. That is a strong majority. But only 43.8% - 50 respondents - report that their organization enforces that policy with technical controls. The remaining gap represents organizations that have policies on paper but rely on an honor system, or where employees simply do not know how the policy is enforced.

"Most marketing professionals are using AI every day, but less than half of their organizations are enforcing corporate usage with technical controls," said Clinton Karr, CMO of ProGEO.ai. "Adoption without governance shows a lack of maturity, which calls into question whether marketing teams are using AI strategically."

The enforcement breakdown is detailed further in the survey data. Of the 112 respondents, 43.8% reported technical controls, 12.5% said their policy runs on an honor system, 13.4% were unsure, 13.4% report no policy, and 17% gave no response. There is also a notable anomaly: 5.4% of respondents reported having a corporate usage policy even though they do not have a corporate-paid GenAI subscription. The AIMM Index interprets this as evidence that some organizations are deliberately avoiding adoption rather than simply lagging behind.

The survey was conducted at RSAC - a cybersecurity conference - and the AIMM Index is careful to flag this context. Cybersecurity companies at RSAC are generally willing to invest in marketing infrastructure. That means the adoption and governance figures in this survey may skew higher than what would be found across other industries. The gap between policy and enforcement observed here is, as the report notes, "likely even more pronounced outside of the cybersecurity industry."

This finding resonates with broader industry data. IAB Europe's first AI in digital advertising report, released in September 2025 after surveying 95 companies across European markets, found 85% of companies deploying AI-based marketing tools - while simultaneously identifying persistent governance challenges as a defining feature of the current landscape.

Content creation dominates, vibe coding emerges

The AIMM Index breaks down usage across ten functional domains and ranks them by daily adoption rate. Content creation leads the field. According to the survey, 83% of marketing professionals use GenAI to brainstorm content - defined as generating concepts, themes, or outlines - at least once a week. That is the most frequent use case measured. Writing or editing content follows closely, with 82.1% doing so at least weekly, and 75% repurposing or personalizing content on a similar cadence.

The top five use cases by daily adoption rate are: content creation (defined as generating first-draft content or reviewing human-written content), recording or transcribing meetings and notes, repurposing or personalizing content, brainstorming concepts and outlines, and market research or competitive intelligence including document summarization. These reflect, as the AIMM Index observes, the tasks where marketers feel most confident delegating to AI - familiar, high-volume workflows where output quality is reasonably easy to evaluate.

The bottom five use cases by daily adoption rate are: reporting (measurement, data analysis, charts, presentations), automation or integration (workflows, APIs, connected tools), role-playing (coaching or persona-testing messaging), image creation, and vibe coding - defined as generating HTML, scripts, or tools. Vibe coding lands last in daily frequency, but 23.2% of respondents still use it at least weekly. That number is significant. It suggests that nearly a quarter of cybersecurity marketing professionals are functioning as what the report calls "citizen developers" - generating code without formal engineering training or role definitions.

The correlation data in the AIMM Index reveals two distinct behavioral clusters. Content creation and brainstorming are tightly correlated (Spearman rank: 0.73), as are content creation and repurposing (0.64). These form one cluster, which the report labels content marketing. On the other side, automation and reporting are closely correlated (0.59), as are automation and vibe coding (0.59). This forms a second cluster the report labels marketing operations. The two personas use GenAI differently - one primarily for editorial output, the other for technical workflows.

High, medium, and low intensity users

The AIMM Index also segments respondents into three maturity tiers based on cumulative AI usage intensity. Each respondent was scored from 0 to 4 across ten use cases (0 = never, 4 = daily), yielding a maximum possible score of 40. The low tier (40 respondents) scored between 0 and 21. The medium tier (37 respondents) scored between 22 and 28. The high tier (35 respondents) scored between 29 and 40. The average across all 112 respondents was 23.8.

The behavioral profile of the high tier is qualitatively different from the other two groups. According to the AIMM Index, high-intensity users show elevated frequency across nearly every use case - not just content creation, but also automation, reporting, role-playing, image creation, and vibe coding. The medium tier cluster around the top five use cases and drop off sharply on the lower five. The low tier shows uniformly sparse activity across the bottom five use cases.

This gradient matters for how organizations think about AI maturity. It is not simply that some professionals use GenAI more than others. The high tier is effectively operating across a different set of tasks - functions that require greater technical confidence and closer integration with business systems.

Comparing forecasts: MIT's 2022 projection versus 2026 reality

The AIMM Index surfaces one particularly pointed comparison. According to the survey document, a 2022 MIT Technology Review Insights report forecast that AI would be adopted for 64% of marketing and advertising use cases by 2025. The ProGEO.ai survey, conducted in March 2026, found that 75.9% of marketing professionals use GenAI on a daily basis. The actual figure exceeded the 2022 forecast. It also arrived faster than the timeline anticipated - which reinforces the case for urgent governance frameworks rather than phased implementation roadmaps.

The question of how to govern AI in marketing settings is one the broader industry has been grappling with from multiple directions. Microsoft's February 2026 positioning of its grounding technology introduced the concept of Generative Engine Optimization as a formal discipline - distinct from SEO and focused on how content participates in AI-generated responses. Meanwhile, the growth of AI referral traffic documented by Microsoft Clarity and the emergence of brand monitoring tools for AI platforms reflect an industry trying to establish measurement infrastructure at the same time adoption is already running at scale.

Market share and the Anthropic factor

The market share data in the AIMM Index carries weight beyond the headline figures. The ProGEO.ai report references an external benchmark: according to Arena, an AI leaderboard developed by researchers at UC Berkeley, Anthropic's Opus 4.6 model was leading both text and code generation benchmarks at the time of publication (April 9, 2026). The survey itself did not measure user preference or satisfaction - only subscription presence. But the combination of near-parity corporate subscription rates (66 ChatGPT vs. 56 Claude) and the benchmark data suggests that Claude has established meaningful enterprise presence in a market that was heavily dominated by OpenAI just two years ago.

That competitive shift has not gone unnoticed by the marketing technology ecosystem. Channel99's February 2026 launch of its MCP server for B2B marketing data integrated simultaneously with ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Claude - a practical acknowledgment that enterprise marketing teams cannot be assumed to standardize on a single AI platform.

What the cybersecurity analogy reveals

The AIMM Index frames its analysis using a comparison to cybersecurity maturity models - a deliberate choice given the survey's venue. Maturity models are standard practice in cybersecurity. The U.S. Department of Defense's Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) is a federally mandated framework for defense contractors. MITRE, a cybersecurity non-profit, published an AI Maturity Model and Organizational Assessment Tool Guide in 2023. These frameworks define progressive assessment levels - typically moving from awareness through experimentation to optimization - across defined functional domains.

The AIMM Index positions itself as marketing's equivalent: a baseline measurement against which organizations can benchmark their own AI adoption. The ten use case domains in the survey map directly to what the report calls "marketing pillars and dimensions." The methodology acknowledges limits - each domain compresses multiple sub-functions into a single question to preserve survey brevity and participation rates.

One analogy the report draws is particularly direct. In cybersecurity, the risk of unmanaged personal accounts is known as Shadow IT - software in use by employees that has not been approved or provisioned by IT departments. The AIMM Index applies the same logic to GenAI: personal subscriptions used for work without organizational oversight constitute Shadow AI. The security risks are different in kind - less about network intrusion and more about data leakage, model training on confidential inputs, and uncontrolled brand voice in AI-generated content - but the structural problem is the same.

The report pushes this analogy one step further. According to the AIMM Index, "ad hoc prompting could be just as dangerous to marketing as Shadow AI is to cybersecurity." The lack of standardized prompting frameworks means that even within organizations with enterprise subscriptions, AI-generated content may reflect highly variable brand voice, tone, and accuracy - without any mechanism to detect or correct this variance at scale.

The McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook covered by PPC Land in July 2025 identified governance - alongside investment and talent - as a primary dimension shaping which organizations extract durable value from AI adoption. The ProGEO.ai findings from March 2026 suggest the governance dimension remains largely unresolved at the practitioner level, even as adoption reaches near-saturation in enterprise marketing contexts.

Advanced use cases not yet measured

The AIMM Index notes explicitly that its ten functional domains do not cover the most sophisticated end of AI deployment in marketing. Building custom GPTs, centralizing teams through shared projects or GitHub repositories, deploying Model Context Protocol servers, and working with vector databases are all identified as more mature use cases that were outside the scope of this survey instrument. These are also, the report notes, the very tools that enable governance of brand identity at scale - the solution to the governance gap the survey documents.

That gap between what is measured and what constitutes advanced practice is itself a useful signal. The survey's high tier - 35 respondents scoring 29 or above out of 40 - is operating at a high frequency across general use cases. But a separate tier, not yet captured in this instrument, likely exists among teams using agentic workflows, custom models, or structured deployment pipelines. AI agents and agentic infrastructure have been a growing focus across the marketing ecosystem throughout 2025 and into 2026, with UC Berkeley's Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity publishing a risk management framework for agentic AI in February 2026. How marketing teams at the advanced end of the distribution interact with these frameworks remains an open question.

Why this matters for the marketing community

The AIMM Index lands at a moment when the advertising and marketing industry is navigating multiple simultaneous pressures. Daily AI usage is a practical reality, not a pilot program. The question is no longer whether marketers will use GenAI - it is how organizations structure, monitor, and govern that use.

The governance gap identified in the survey - 76.8% with a policy, 43.8% with enforcement - is not simply an administrative oversight. It has direct implications for brand safety, data handling, competitive intelligence, and content quality. As the IAB Europe report from September 2025 found across European markets, governance challenges are a consistent feature of AI adoption across the advertising value chain, regardless of geography or segment.

At the same time, the AIMM Index offers a baseline. For organizations that want to measure where they stand relative to peers - even peers in a relatively mature, enterprise-technology-oriented industry - this survey provides a concrete reference point. A daily GenAI usage rate of 75.9%, a content creation adoption of 83%, and a vibe coding participation rate of 23.2% are now numbers against which marketing teams can situate themselves.

Timeline

Summary

Who: ProGEO.ai, a San Francisco-based generative engine optimization agency led by CMO Clinton Karr, surveyed 112 marketing professionals attending RSAC - a cybersecurity conference with nearly 44,000 attendees - and published the AI Marketing Maturity (AIMM) Index on April 13, 2026. The overwhelming majority of respondents work at cybersecurity companies.

What: The AIMM Index measures GenAI adoption rates, platform market share, usage frequency across ten functional domains, and the gap between corporate policy and technical enforcement. Key findings: 91.1% hold a corporate-paid GenAI subscription; 75.9% use GenAI for work daily; ChatGPT leads corporate subscriptions (66 respondents) with Claude close behind (56); 76.8% have a corporate usage policy but only 43.8% enforce it with technical controls; 83% use GenAI for content brainstorming at least weekly; 23.2% use it for vibe coding at least weekly.

When: The survey was conducted in March 2026. The findings were published on April 13, 2026. The RSAC conference provided the sampling frame.

Where: The survey was conducted at RSAC in San Francisco. ProGEO.ai is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Why: The AIMM Index matters for the marketing community because it establishes a quantitative baseline for AI adoption at the enterprise level - at a moment when use is already near-universal in this segment but governance structures remain incomplete. The 33-percentage-point gap between policy existence (76.8%) and technical enforcement (43.8%) represents an organizational risk that affects brand safety, data handling, and content quality. The survey provides a benchmark against which individual marketing teams can measure their own adoption rates and governance maturity relative to a well-resourced, enterprise-technology peer group.

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