IAB Europe published its second annual Impact of AI on Digital Advertising Report on September 24, 2026, timed to the DMEXCO trade fair in Cologne. According to IAB Europe, 86% of respondents say their organisation uses AI for marketing, 72% of those answering the investment question report higher general AI investment in 2026 than in 2025, and 78% have identified a formal owner for AI governance. The report was developed by IAB Europe and members of its AI Working Group, and it rests on a small base: 50 respondents, according to both Digiday and the report-tracking service Market Radar, down from 95 companies in the 2025 edition.

In Short

Europe's main online advertising trade body asked 50 companies how they use AI, and most said they already use it for marketing and are spending more on it this year. Many expect AI programs that buy ads largely on their own to be working for real within a year, but very few have that running today, and fewer than half have rules written specifically for AI in advertising. The survey is small, so the numbers show a direction rather than a precise measure of the whole European market.

What the report covers

The report sits on a landing page on IAB Europe's knowledge hub, dated September 24, 2026 and credited to Lauren Wakefield, with the full study hosted as an interactive slide presentation at reports.iabot.eu. According to the landing page, "AI is moving beyond experimentation and becoming more embedded across advertising operations." The same page says "investment is rising, governance is becoming more formal and expectations around agentic advertising are growing."

Five themes structure the study, according to IAB Europe: AI adoption and emerging agentic capabilities; current use cases, measurement and investment; skills, governance and accountability; security, privacy and operational challenges; and industry support and readiness for the EU AI Act.

Six headline findings appear on the landing page:

  • 86% use AI for marketing.
  • 72% report higher general AI investment in 2026.
  • 78% have identified a formal owner for AI governance.
  • More than half expect agentic ad buying to reach operational use or scale within the next year.
  • Security ranks as the number one AI-related concern.
  • 62% say they would benefit from industry guidance on AI for marketing.

Dimitris Beis, Data & Innovation Strategist at IAB Europe, is listed as the contact for the AI Working Group.

Method: 50 respondents, and smaller bases underneath

Neither the landing page nor IAB Europe's press release states the sample size, the fieldwork dates or how respondents were recruited. Those details come from secondary sources. According to Digiday, which reported on the study on September 24, IAB Europe surveyed 50 advertising executives in European markets, with fieldwork carried out over the spring and summer of 2026. Market Radar, a service that catalogues marketing research, lists the report as a survey with n=50 covering the EMEA region and gives the base behind each figure.

Those bases matter, because several headline numbers rest on a fraction of the 50. According to Market Radar, the 72% investment figure is 21 of 29 respondents, the 59% who report increased investment in AI marketing technologies is 17 of 29, and the average performance score of 2.76 out of 5 comes from 21 respondents. The 62% wanting industry guidance is 31 of 50 and the 38% still assessing the EU AI Act is 19 of 50. At a base of 29, a single respondent moves a result by more than three percentage points.

No external research agency is named. IAB Europe describes the report as developed by IAB Europe and members of its AI Working Group, which means the trade body that represents the industry also designed and ran the survey of that industry.

The comparison with last year is also uneven. The first edition, which PPC Land covered when IAB Europe found 85% adoption of AI across digital advertising on September 18, 2025, drew on 95 companies surveyed by email from July to August 2025, in five languages, with 51% of responses in German. A move from 85% to 86% between two samples of 95 and 50 is not a measurable change. IAB Europe's own release presents the investment comparison as the year-on-year point, and that comparison is a question asked within the 2026 survey, not a comparison of the two editions.

Adoption and investment

According to Digiday, 47 of the 50 respondents say their organisations use AI internally and 43 use it for marketing - the 86% headline. That leaves seven of 50 companies whose AI use stops short of marketing, and three with no reported internal use at all.

Investment is moving in one direction among those who answered. According to IAB Europe, 72% report higher general AI investment in 2026 than in 2025 across business functions, while 59% are increasing investment specifically in AI marketing technologies. The gap between those two numbers suggests that part of the new AI spending in these companies is going to functions other than marketing, though the report's small bases make that reading tentative.

What AI is doing day to day

Reporting is the most common job handed to AI. According to Digiday, 22 of 29 respondents named reporting, analysis and dashboards as an AI-supported workflow, which PPC Land calculates at 76%. Programmatic optimisation came next, at 59%. Both are back-office tasks that sit inside existing programmatic operations rather than new channels or products.

Measurement of AI's value follows the same pattern. Operational efficiency is the most commonly selected measure of AI effectiveness, cited by 69% of respondents, according to IAB Europe's release. Digiday puts the efficiency figure at 68%, a one-point difference that may come from rounding or a different base; the report's own slide could not be checked against either number.

A 2.76 out of 5 performance score

The most sobering number in the study is the performance rating. According to IAB Europe, respondents rating AI's current performance in advertising operations gave it an average score of 2.76 out of 5 - below the midpoint of the scale. ExchangeWire described the result as mixed. The figure rests on 21 respondents, according to Market Radar.

Set beside the investment data, the rating describes companies spending more on a technology they score as middling. That is not a contradiction: efficiency gains on reporting work can justify spending even when results in campaign operations are uneven. But it does weaken any reading of the study as evidence that AI is already lifting advertising performance in Europe. The 2025 edition reported a split along similar lines, with 60% of ad tech firms citing KPI gains against 48% of agencies, and fewer than a third of publishers reporting higher CPMs.

Agentic buying: expectations against deployment

The headline that travelled furthest from the report concerns autonomous buying. According to IAB Europe, 58% of respondents expect agentic ad buying to reach operational use or scale within the next year. Digiday broke that down: 30% expect AI agents to become a main way of buying and selling ads in some markets, while 28% expect regular use without that level of scale.

Current deployment is far thinner. According to Digiday, 36 of 47 respondents say they either have no agentic system running day to day or have one that people still direct or plan alongside. PPC Land calculates that at 77% of those who answered.

The report grades autonomy in levels. At Level 2, according to IAB Europe, people and agents jointly plan, delegate and execute. Size separates the sample sharply on this measure: among respondents who answered, 86% of those from organisations with 501 or more staff report their most advanced production agentic system at Level 2 or above, against 48% of those from organisations with up to 500 staff. The release does not say how many respondents fall in each size band, which matters when the total is 50.

Beis put the gap plainly in IAB Europe's release, saying ambition remains ahead of practice in areas such as agentic trading, although the results suggest strong interest and continuing investment. He framed the questions for industry leadership as where the value is, whether the conditions to capture it are in place, and who is accountable when something goes wrong.

Beis has made similar arguments before. In an IAB Europe explainer covered by PPC Land, he described three levels of scaling agentic advertising, from single agents to multi-agent systems to full ecosystems, and listed hallucination, prompt injection, trust and accountability as the problems that grow at each step. A month later, an IAB Europe webinar showed working agentic tools from PubMatic, Human Security and Plan.Net Studios, with PubMatic confirming its first agentic campaign in EMEA.

Commercial forecasts point the same cautious way. PPC Land reported in August that Magnite's chief executive expects 2027 agentic ad spend to stay near $700 million at most, while holding companies were bundling AI services into principal media deals. Digiday's coverage of the IAB Europe study also carried a sceptical voice: Ian Maxwell, chief executive of Converge Digital, argued that agentic buying automates only small parts of a large process and still needs human oversight.

Governance: owners appointed, rules lagging

Governance has formalised at the top. According to IAB Europe, 78% of respondents have identified a formal owner for AI governance. In the 2025 edition, nearly one in five respondents had no formal AI governance at all.

Rules written for advertising have not kept pace. According to IAB Europe, only 48% of respondents have AI guidelines specifically for advertising and marketing. The comparable 2025 figure was 43%, against 68% with general internal AI guidelines. With the sample change, the 2026 figure says that roughly half of the surveyed businesses still run AI in advertising without written rules for that use.

Katharina Schneeberg, Head of Innovation & Technology at BVDW, the German digital association, and co-lead of IAB Europe's AI Working Group, said in the release that AI adoption is no longer the key challenge, and that organisations are now focused on scaling AI across the business, establishing governance and turning experiments into business results. She added that companies will need practical guidance, shared frameworks and real-world examples to deploy agentic systems responsibly.

Demand for that guidance shows in the data. According to IAB Europe, 62% say they would benefit from AI marketing guidelines developed by an industry association. In 2025, about two-thirds said the same.

Barriers and concerns

Skills remain the main obstacle. A lack of expertise or training is the most commonly cited barrier to adoption, according to IAB Europe, selected by 42% of respondents (21 of 50), according to Market Radar. Three further barriers tie at 30% each: difficulty integrating tools or switching providers, implementation costs, and legal uncertainty. Limited high-quality data trails at 14%. The ranking mirrors 2025, when lack of expertise led at 45% and system integration and regulatory uncertainty followed at 33% each. The focus on training echoes the wider industry push on upskilling staff for AI tools.

The ranking of concerns has shifted. "Security ranks as the number one AI-related concern," according to IAB Europe, with privacy ranking second. In the 2025 edition, privacy ranked first and brand safety second, with security not leading the list. The release notes that responses vary widely across the sample, and it cites wider operational pressures: resource constraints and the difficulty of managing legal, commercial, ethical and security risks together. No percentages are given for the concerns.

The move of security to the top coincides with the arrival of agents that act on systems rather than only generate text. Prompt injection and the question of which agents can be trusted with buying authority are security problems before they are privacy problems, and Beis's own explainer named both.

The EU AI Act

According to IAB Europe, 38% of respondents are still assessing the impact of the EU AI Act on their company. In 2025, about 60% said they had assessed or were assessing it, and those who had completed assessments rated their compliance readiness at 6 out of 10 on average. The 2026 release gives no readiness score.

The legal calendar moved during the fieldwork period. PPC Land reported in May that EU negotiators agreed to push high-risk AI deadlines to December 2, 2027 and August 2, 2028 under the Digital Omnibus package. By August, a consolidated text had given the Commission's AI Office penalty powers of up to 5% of daily turnover over AI systems built into very large online platforms, with the Act's general application date falling on August 2, 2026. Respondents still assessing the law were doing so while its timetable was being rewritten.

Why this matters for the marketing community

Industry surveys of AI use now arrive in quantity, and their samples differ widely. When IAB UK found that 95% of UK digital advertising businesses use AI in May, the finding drew on more than 250 decision-makers surveyed by Public First between February 17 and 27, 2026. IAB Europe's 50 respondents spread across European markets cannot be compared directly with that, nor with its own 95-company first edition. The study is most useful for the internal relationships it shows - large companies far ahead of small ones on agent autonomy, investment rising while performance scores sit below the midpoint, governance owners in place while channel-specific rules lag - rather than for any single percentage.

For agencies and ad tech vendors pitching agentic products in Europe, the gap between the 58% who expect operational use within a year and the 77% of answering companies with no autonomous system in daily use is the number to watch. The next edition, if IAB Europe keeps its September timing, would show whether that expectation turned into deployment by autumn 2027. Panelists at IAB Europe's Virtual Programmatic Day in May had already flagged guardrails on autonomous buying as unresolved, and the survey suggests the industry's expectations have run ahead of those guardrails.

The release itself was timed to DMEXCO. IAB Europe says the findings will shape the priorities of its AI Working Group, which produces guidance and research and runs webinars, workshops and use case showcases.

Timeline

Summary

Who: IAB Europe, the European-level association for digital advertising, with members of its AI Working Group, including co-lead Katharina Schneeberg of BVDW and IAB Europe's Dimitris Beis. The survey covered 50 respondents from European advertising businesses, according to Digiday and Market Radar.

What: The 2026 Impact of AI on Digital Advertising Report, the second annual edition. It finds 86% use AI for marketing, 72% of those answering report higher AI investment than in 2025, 78% have a formal AI governance owner but only 48% have advertising-specific AI rules, 58% expect agentic ad buying to reach operational use or scale within a year, and respondents rate AI's current performance in ad operations at 2.76 out of 5.

When: Published September 24, 2026, at DMEXCO, with fieldwork in the spring and summer of 2026, according to Digiday.

Where: Europe, with the full report hosted as an interactive presentation at reports.iabot.eu and a landing page on IAB Europe's knowledge hub.

Why: The study tracks how far European advertising businesses have moved from AI experimentation to governed, scaled use. Its findings show expectations for autonomous ad buying running well ahead of current deployment, a large gap between big and small companies, and security replacing privacy as the leading concern, all on a sample small enough that individual percentages carry wide uncertainty.