Marketing and advertising professionals have spread their AI work across several tools at once, and ChatGPT is no longer far ahead of the rest. Basis, the Chicago-based media software company, today published the fourth annual edition of its "AI and the Future of Marketing" report, which found that 74.5% of 184 surveyed professionals use ChatGPT in their work, down from 88.6% a year earlier, while Anthropic's Claude rose from 17.9% to 72.3%. The 42-page report also found that daily AI use nearly doubled to 61.4%, that 51.1% of organizations now run AI agents, and that just 6.5% measure the return on their AI spending against defined benchmarks.

In Short

A software company asked 184 people who work in marketing and advertising how they use AI, and found that almost all of them use it and most use it every day. The tools they use have changed a lot in a year, with Claude catching up to ChatGPT, and many companies now let AI agents do whole jobs like reporting and writing campaign briefs. The catch is that very few of these companies check whether the AI is actually paying off, so they are spending more without proof it works.

What Basis published and when

Basis released the findings today from Chicago in a news post titled "Daily AI Use Nearly Doubles Among Marketers as Measurement Lags," alongside the full report. According to the report, the survey of 184 marketing and advertising professionals across agencies, brands and publishers ran from July 16 to August 14, 2026. The news post describes the fieldwork more loosely as taking place "in August 2026."

This is the fourth edition. Basis has asked broadly the same questions every year since 2023, which gives the report its most useful feature: a time series. The 2023 wave had 202 respondents, 2024 had 141, 2025 had 140 and 2026 has 184. Some questions were added later, so not every metric goes back four years.

Sample size matters for reading the numbers. With 184 respondents, each person is worth about 0.54 percentage points, according to a PPC Land calculation. Several of the most quoted findings come from smaller subgroups. The leadership questions draw on 63 to 65 respondents at VP level and above, where a single person moves a result by about 1.6 points. The agent-use breakdown is based on the 94 respondents whose organizations have built or adopted agents. Basis does not publish a margin of error or describe how respondents were recruited.

Basis is not a neutral observer. The company, which has sold media software since 2001, describes itself in the report as "the only unified media platform to consolidate planning, digital operations, reporting, and financial reconciliation across programmatic, publisher-direct, search, and social." The report's conclusion, that measurement is "close to impossible when planning, execution, reporting, and reconciliation live in separate systems," maps closely onto what Basis sells.

Adoption is now close to total

According to the report, 98.4% of respondents say they use generative or agentic AI in their marketing or advertising work, and 93.5% use it at least once a week. Only 1.6% say they do not use it at all. That share was 5.0% in 2025 and 27.7% in 2023.

The bigger shift is frequency. Daily use reached 61.4%, up from 33.6% in 2025 and 10.9% in 2023. Put differently, the share of daily users has grown more than fivefold in three years, according to a PPC Land calculation based on Basis's figures.

How is that time being spent? Research (85.9%) and ideation (83.2%) are again the most common uses, followed by drafting content and creative (67.4%) and streamlining processes (60.9%). The faster movement is further along the campaign process. Data optimization climbed from 35.0% to 53.8%. Producing images and video rose from 25.0% to 41.8%. Media planning stands at 39.1%, SEO and keyword work at 39.7%, repurposing content at 38.0%, media buying strategy at 30.4% and generating ad iterations or personalized ads at 29.9%.

"Taken together, the movement suggests AI's role is expanding from helping marketers begin their work to helping them complete it," the report states.

The tool market fragments

A year ago, ChatGPT led the field by more than 40 points. In the 2025 wave, 88.6% of respondents used it, against 45.0% for Gemini, 41.4% for Microsoft Copilot and 17.9% for Claude, according to the chart in the report. In 2026, ChatGPT sits at 74.5%, Claude at 72.3%, Copilot at 55.4% and Gemini at 47.8%. The gap between first and second place has shrunk to 2.2 points.

Below the top four, Adobe Firefly reached 20.1% (from 12.1%), Midjourney 17.9% (from 12.1%), Perplexity 13.0%, Grok 5.4% and Jasper 3.3%. Salesforce's Agentforce fell from 5.0% to 1.6%. Stable Diffusion was at 2.2%.

The survey's direction matches what traffic panels have shown during 2026, though the scale differs sharply. Similarweb data showed ChatGPT's share of generative AI web traffic falling to 52.7% while Claude rose to 8.9% by late May. Comscore's second-quarter panel data put ChatGPT's US prompt share at 50% in June, down from 70% in January, with Claude at 11%. Those panels measure consumer traffic. The Basis survey measures whether a professional or their organization uses a tool at all, so a respondent running five tools counts in all five. That is why Claude can be used by 72.3% of marketers in one dataset and hold a single-digit traffic share in another.

The share of organizations paying for premium AI tools rose to 88.6%, from 65.7% in 2025 and 44.0% in 2024, according to Basis. Among the 163 organizations that pay, Claude Pro was the most used paid product at 33.1%, followed by Microsoft Copilot Premium at 29.4%, ChatGPT Pro at 25.2%, Claude Enterprise at 22.1% and ChatGPT Plus at 21.5%. Midjourney stood at 19.0%, Adobe Firefly at 16.6% and Gemini Pro at 14.7%. ChatGPT Enterprise reached 12.9% and Claude Max 9.2%.

Basis groups these tiers by vendor. It says "premium versions of Claude are now used by nearly two-thirds" of paying organizations and that ChatGPT's paid tiers reach 59.6%. Those figures match a straight sum of the tiers (33.1% plus 22.1% plus 9.2% for Claude, which comes to 64.4%; 25.2% plus 21.5% plus 12.9% for ChatGPT), according to a PPC Land calculation. A simple sum counts an organization twice if it pays for two tiers of the same product, so the vendor totals are upper bounds rather than counts of organizations. Paid Gemini tiers reach 24.6% on the same method.

The year-on-year change in the paid market is stark. In 2025, ChatGPT Plus was the most used paid product at 38.0%, ChatGPT Pro was at 31.5% and Claude Pro at 15.2%. Copilot held almost flat, moving from 28.3% to 29.4%.

Custom models

The share of organizations running a custom or semi-custom model rose to 43.5% from 28.5%. Nearly all of that growth came from semi-custom models, built on top of an existing LLM, which rose from 17.1% to 31.5%. Fully custom models moved only from 11.4% to 12.0%. Another 19.0% say they plan to implement custom solutions within 12 months, while 33.5% use none and have no near-term plans, down from 47.1%.

The measurement gap

The report's central finding concerns proof rather than use. According to Basis, 6.5% of organizations measure the ROI of their AI investments with defined metrics and benchmarks. Another 23.4% measure it, but only anecdotally. The remaining 65.1% split three ways: 18.5% do not measure ROI but plan to, 22.7% do not measure it and 23.9% are not sure whether anyone in their organization does.

In a sample of 184, 6.5% is about 12 respondents, according to a PPC Land calculation.

"For an industry that purports to hold every media dollar to account, the absence of a comparable standard for AI is unlikely to hold much longer, particularly as those investments continue to swell," the report states.

The spending is not slowing. Three-quarters of respondents (75.0%) say their organization invested in technology to automate or streamline processes in the past 12 months, up from 63.6%. Plans for the next 12 months are almost unchanged: 78.8% intend to invest, against 79.3% a year ago.

Other surveys have pointed at the same weakness. TransUnion's study of 100 senior US marketers found that only 53% reported meaningful ROI from AI-driven marketing, and 65% measured AI's impact mainly through estimated cost or time savings. A WSJ Intelligence and Code and Theory study of 801 executives found that one in four large US companies has no one accountable for coordinating AI. Last year, MiQ's survey of 3,169 marketers found that 72% planned to expand AI use while 45% felt confident applying it.

Self-reported gains

Without benchmarks, the efficiency figures in the report rest on respondents' own judgment. Three-quarters (75.0%) say AI made them moderately or significantly more efficient over the past year. Those reporting significant gains rose from 13.5% in 2024 to 25.7% in 2025 and 33.2% in 2026. Just 4.3% saw no efficiency gain, down from 19.9% in 2024.

Quality is a different story. While 60.9% say AI made them moderately or significantly better at their jobs, 16.8% report no measurable impact, nearly the same as a year ago. The split by seniority is wide. Among leaders at VP level and above, 66.2% say AI made them moderately or significantly better. Among entry-to-mid level staff, 63.9% say only slightly or moderately better, and 21.0% report no measurable effect.

Basis offers an explanation: senior staff use AI for "synthesis, analysis, and decision support," while junior staff use it "to produce and process," work where speed changes but quality does not necessarily follow.

Data foundations lag behind

The report links the measurement problem to first-party data. Only 22.8% of respondents call first-party data extensive or foundational to their AI initiatives, barely changed from 21.4% a year earlier. In the chart, 25.5% call it somewhat central, 18.5% minimal and 14.1% not at all, with 19.0% unsure.

On data quality, 13.0% describe their organization's first-party data as extensive and well structured, down from 17.9%. Another 31.0% say it is sufficient but siloed across teams, 26.6% call it limited and fragmented, 12.0% say they do not really use first-party data and 17.4% are unsure.

The report draws a direct line from those figures to agent deployments. "While half the industry now runs agents, just 13.0% of marketers describe their organization's first-party data as extensive and well-structured, most likely resulting in agents underperforming their potential," it states. That last clause is Basis's interpretation; the survey does not measure agent performance.

Agents arrive in volume

The share of organizations that have created or begun to use AI agents for marketing or advertising rose from 20.0% to 51.1%, an increase Basis puts at 155.5%. The report defines agents as systems that "pull data, make decisions, and take action to meet a predefined objective, all with limited or no human involvement," which places them within the wider category of agentic AI.

Among the 94 respondents whose organizations use agents, reporting and analytics is the most common assignment at 72.3%. Campaign brief creation follows at 56.4%, then content creation (45.7%), creative optimization (38.3%), media planning (35.1%), personalization (25.5%) and media buying (18.1%).

Media buying, the task closest to spending money, is the least delegated of the named categories. AppsFlyer data published last December showed that 57% of AI agent deployments in app marketing focused on technical automation such as configuration checks.

Expectations run ahead of current use. According to the report, 77.2% of 180 respondents expect digital advertising to be at least partially agentic or automated within three to five years: 50.0% say partially, 25.0% mostly and 2.2% fully. Leaders are more confident than staff. Among 63 leaders, 36.5% expect mostly and 3.2% fully automated advertising, compared with 18.8% and 1.7% among 117 entry-to-mid level respondents.

Expectations about what AI will change most have also turned. In 2024, 57.4% named content creation as the part of the marketing process most likely to be affected. In 2026, that figure is 23.4%, and analysis leads at 27.2%, up from 11.3% two years ago. Creative optimization (15.8%) and media planning (14.7%) follow, and 6.5% named team size.

Jobs: tasks move faster than headcount

Task replacement nearly doubled. According to Basis, 47.8% of respondents say their organization replaced human tasks with AI solutions in the past 12 months, up from 27.9% in 2025, 21.3% in 2024 and 10.4% in 2023.

Headcount replacement went the other way. Among leaders, 20.6% say they have used AI to replace employees or have plans to do so, down from 25.4% in 2025 but up from 18.6% in 2024 and 11.5% in 2023. With 63 leaders answering, the drop from 25.4% to 20.6% is equivalent to about three people, according to a PPC Land calculation.

Basis reads the gap as organizations "putting the additional capacity toward more work, rather than fewer people," and adds that "it remains unclear whether that reflects a durable division of labor, or simply a lag." The question is live in the industry. Earlier this month HubSpot cut about 660 jobs while reorganizing its product teams around customer outcomes, while insisting AI efficiencies did not drive the decision.

Respondents are more worried about the industry than about themselves. Just over half (50.6%) expect AI to cause substantial job losses in digital marketing within three to five years, down from 58.6% in 2025 but above 41.1% in 2024. Yet 70.0% see little or no risk that AI could replace their own job in that time, up from 66.4%. The share seeing no risk at all rose from 17.1% to 25.0%.

Leaders report near-total internal acceptance. According to the report, 96.9% of leaders say their teams have embraced AI, up from 74.6% in 2024, and 28.6% say their teams strongly embraced it, double the 14.0% two years ago. Not one leader described strong resistance.

Content quality, GEO and brand safety

Confidence in AI output keeps falling. According to Basis, 76.6% say AI-generated content does not match their organization's human-generated work, up from 75.0% in 2025, 70.2% in 2024 and 70.3% in 2023. The report attributes this to sharper judgment after four years of daily use and to "the proliferation of low-effort AI content across the open web." NP Digital's survey of 565 marketers earlier this year found that 47.1% encountered AI inaccuracies several times a week.

On search, 53.4% of 178 respondents say their organization has begun optimizing content specifically for AI search, a practice the report calls "generative engine optimization" or "answer engine optimization." That is often shortened to GEO. Another 24.7% have not and 21.9% are unsure.

Every respondent (100% of 180) agreed that AI poses a brand safety and misinformation risk for digital marketers. The share calling that risk moderate or significant rose to 92.2% from 88.6%. Significant risk reached 50.0%, up from 40.0%, and moderate risk was 42.2%. Concern about AI-generated inventory has a measurable basis in ad spending: a TAG and ANA analysis found that AI slop accounted for 1.3% to 2.4% of open web programmatic spend and was graded as premium inventory more than 70% of the time.

Energy and regulation

Concern about AI's environmental footprint rose to 81.1%, from 53.2% in 2024, according to Basis. Support for regulating AI's development and use reached 83.7%, up from 70.0%, while 6.0% oppose regulation and 10.3% are unsure. The report frames this against "federal regulators taking a deliberately hands-off approach toward AI," a US-centric framing that reflects where the sample appears to be based. The report does not state respondents' countries.

Sentiment: positive, and more skeptical

Respondents are more positive and more doubtful at the same time. According to the report, 79.3% believe AI will have a positive impact on marketing and advertising, up from 75.7%, and 90.2% expect AI to radically transform digital advertising within three to five years. Yet 53.3% say AI is overhyped, up from 40.7% in 2025 and back to the 53.2% recorded in 2024.

Asked about their attitude, 25.5% describe themselves as excited, up from 16.4%, and 52.7% as cautiously optimistic, down from 59.7%. Leaders are more positive than staff: 87.7% of leaders expect a positive industry impact compared with 74.7% of those at director level and below.

Source discrepancies

A few figures in the report do not match each other. The text says 22.5% of respondents describe first-party data as somewhat useful but not yet integrated, while the chart on the same page shows 25.5% for "somewhat." The text puts 2025 environmental concern at 63.6%, while the chart shows 63.3%; the report's own "nearly 18 percentage points" increase fits the chart figure. The report says that "for the first time, a majority" rate the brand safety threat as significant, but the chart shows exactly 50.0%, which is half rather than a majority. Several charts label the junior group "Director-level and above" while the text and leader charts describe it as director level and below. PPC Land has used the chart figures where the two differ.

What Basis says

"Marketers have moved well past the question of whether or not AI belongs in their workflow. Yet, more work is needed to justify the investment," said Katie McAdams, chief marketing and commercial officer at Basis, in the news post. McAdams added that she believes "the next stage in our industry's AI evolution will come from unified media platforms that are building data foundations to show investment accountability, thus allowing organizations to scale agentic AI with confidence."

The report's closing section lays out three consequences of the measurement gap: effectiveness, because organizations "cannot separate a genuinely effective deployment from an expensive one that feels productive"; credibility, because "AI budgets are growing faster than almost any other line item in marketing, and they are currently the least defensible ones"; and agentic foundations, because "autonomy applied to an unmeasured process simply produces more of that process, faster."

Why this matters for the marketing community

For agencies and in-house teams, the report captures a specific moment. AI has moved from drafting copy to running reports, writing briefs and adjusting creative with limited supervision, and half of the organizations surveyed now run agents. Spending on the tools has risen every year. The question of whether any of it improves results, rather than just speeding up work, remains unanswered inside nearly two-thirds of these organizations.

The tool findings matter for a different reason. Marketing teams that standardized on one vendor two years ago now spread work across three or four, with paid tiers from several companies on the books. That affects procurement, data governance and the reliability of any internal comparison between tools. It also complicates measurement, since an output may pass through several models before it reaches a campaign.

The figures carry clear limits. The sample is small, the subgroups are smaller still, recruitment is undisclosed and every number is self-reported. The report comes from a company that sells the integrated platform its conclusions recommend. As a four-year series from the same publisher, though, it offers a consistent view of how practitioners describe their own use of AI, and on the question of measurement their answers have not improved as fast as their use.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Basis, a Chicago-based media software company, surveyed 184 marketing and advertising professionals at agencies, brands and publishers. Katie McAdams, its chief marketing and commercial officer, commented on the results.

What: The fourth annual "AI and the Future of Marketing" report found that 61.4% of respondents use AI daily, ChatGPT use fell to 74.5% while Claude rose to 72.3%, 51.1% of organizations run AI agents, 47.8% replaced human tasks with AI, and only 6.5% measure AI ROI against defined benchmarks.

When: The survey ran from July 16 to August 14, 2026, and Basis published the report and its news post today, October 19, 2026.

Where: Basis released the findings from Chicago. The report does not state respondents' countries, though its framing of regulation is US-focused.

Why: The data shows AI use and spending rising every year while very few organizations can show whether the investment improves results, a gap that grows as agents take on reporting, briefs and creative work with limited human oversight.