The Stats That Change The Question

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73% of marketers now use AI every day. 86% say it saves them time. 86% say it makes them more productive. But only 30% say they are seeing significant measurable results. And when I saw those numbers together, I thought, "Wait a minute. Maybe the big AI question for marketers is no longer are we using AI?" Maybe the question is, are we actually becoming better marketers, or are we simply doing more marketing faster? Because those are not the same thing and I think that gap tells us something important about where marketing is heading next Hello everyone, and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast. My name is Joeri Billast and I'm your podcast host, and today I'm doing something a little bit different. This is a special episode inspired by the newly released 2026 AI Marketing Industry Report written by Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner and Social Media Marketing World. Michael and his team have been tracking how marketers use AI for three years now, and there is a lot in this report. Well, I'm not going to walk you through every chart.

Adoption Is Done Leadership Begins

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you can read the report yourself, and I strongly recommend that you do. I'll put the link to the report in the show notes. But what I want to do instead is take a few of the findings and ask what do they actually mean for marketing leaders? Because when I look at the numbers, I saw a much bigger story, and I think that story is this: the AI adoption race is ending, the AI leadership race is beginning And before we dive in, a quick thank you to RYO and to Metricool for supporting my Web3 CMO Stories podcast. Now, let's get into it. Let's start with that 73%. In 2024, only 37% of marketers in this research said they used AI every day. In 2025, it was 61%, and today it's 73%, and another 17% use it weekly. So 90% are now using AI at least every week, and that is a massive change in only two years And Michael actually says something important in the introduction to the report. When they started this research, marketers were still asking whether AI belonged in their world. Now that question has been answered. If you're still having the internal discussion, should our marketing team start using AI? You're having the wrong conversation. Your people are probably already using it, and the much better question is: what are they using it for? And what is actually changing because of it? And that brings us back to those other

Faster Output Vs Measurable Value

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numbers. Faster does not automatically mean better. Eighty-six percent say AI saves them time. Eighty-six percent say it increases productivity, and that is impressive. But only thirty percent say they can point to significant measurable results. And another thirty-nine percent say they are seeing some results, but those results are difficult to measure. And that's where I stopped because there is a big difference between we are doing things faster and we are creating more value Imagine your content team can now produce 10 articles instead of three. Great. But are those 10 articles better? are more people finding you? Do they trust you more? Are you generating more qualified opportunities? Are you retaining more customers? Are you increasing revenue? Or have you simply found a much faster way to fill the internet? And that's a very different question And I see versions of this conversation in my own work with companies as well. The first AI questions were often about tools. What should we use? How can we create content faster? How can we automate this? But once you do those things, the question moves up one level. What should we actually be doing? And that is strategy Activity has become cheap, value has not. And that is something I wrote about in my book, The Future CMO. One of my core arguments is that the role of the CMO has to move beyond marketing activity and toward value creation. Philip Kotler endorsed the book, and one of the things he highlighted in his feedback was exactly this shift. The old CMO could talk about marketing activity and marketing metrics. The future CMO increasingly has to connect marketing with financial performance, and AI makes that even more urgent because AI is making activity incredibly cheap Need another headline? Done. Another email? Done. Five campaign ideas? Done. 20 variations of a social post? Done. What used to take hours now can take minutes. But here is the important part. AI can make the output cheaper without making the outcome more valuable, and I think that's one of the biggest traps marketing leaders need to avoid If we measure the success of AI by the amount of content we create or the hours we save, we are stopping too early. The board doesn't ultimately care that you created a campaign three days faster. It cares what happens because of the campaign. So perhaps the most

The Future CMO Creates Outcomes

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important AI skill for a CMO is not creating more, but it is knowing where speed creates value and where it simply creates more noise. And that brings me to Gary Vee. Earlier this year, I had Gary Vaynerchuk on the podcast. I asked him a question I'm personally very interested in as an AI visibility strategist. More people are now asking ChatGPT and other AI platforms for recommendations instead of only going to Google. So how do you make sure your brand gets discovered? Gary's answer was basically create Written content, audio, video, be present in the places where people consume information and where machines increasingly find information. and I agree with him, visibility matters enormously. If nobody can find you, it doesn't matter how good you are, But there's a second side to that argument, because AI makes creating all of the content easier for you, and it makes creating all of the content easier for everybody else too. So what happens when everyone follows the same advice? We get more. More articles, more videos, more LinkedIn posts, more emails, more everything. And suddenly the problem isn't, isn't a lack of content anymore, but it is a lack of difference interestingly, shortly after recording with Gary, I recorded another episode with Chris Do, and I asked Chris, If AI makes it easier than ever to create and distribute content, what becomes the real differentiator?" And his answer came down to something deeply human. Your voice, your ideas, your lived experience, your point of view. Chris talked about how AI is very good at producing content in the middle, and the middle is crowded The middle is safe. The middle is acceptable, but the middle is also very easy to forget. And that conversation really stayed with me because if you put Gary and Chris together, you get an interesting tension. Gary says, "You need to create and be visible," and Chris says, "Yes, but don't disappear into the average." And I think they both are right. The question is no longer whether you can create enough content. AI largely solves that problem. The question becomes, do you have anything worth amplifying? That's a much harder question. Competence is becoming the baseline. In The Future CMO, I describe this as the commoditization of basic competence, and that's a complicated way of saying something very simple. Being pretty good is becoming easier. Pretty good copy, pretty good design, pretty good research, pretty good presentations, pretty good campaign ideas. Technology is raising the floor, and that's positive. But when the floor rises, the things above the floor become more valuable. Judgment, taste, courage, creativity, experience, a point of view, and trust, especially trust Now, the report also has a warning. Seventy-eight percent are concerned about accuracy and relia-reliability. Seventy-seven

Visibility Vs Difference In Content

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percent are concerned about data privacy and security. And I find those numbers extremely important Earlier this year, I stood on a TEDx stage here in Lisbon, and I gave a talk called Why Trust is the Only Thing AI Cannot Scale. My point was that you cannot automate trust into existence. You can scale content, you can scale outreach, you can scale personalization, but if you make the wrong promise 100,000 times, you also scale the mistake. And if you publish information that is not correct, speed does not help you. And if your customers don't trust what they see, another 100 pieces of content are not the answer. And that's why I think trust is becoming more important as AI becomes more capable. Technology increases what we can do. Leadership still has to decide what we should do And here is maybe the most surprising leadership gap. There is another set of numbers in Michael's report that I think deserves more attention. Seventy-six percent say their companies encourage the use of AI, but only seven percent receive AI training from their company. Seven percent. And fifty-five percent say that they themselves are primarily responsible for AI adoption. Eighty-five percent learn through their own experimentation. Now, there's some important context here The research comes from the social media examiner community, and many respondents are founders, consultants, and people working in smaller organizations. So I would not take those percentages and claim they represent every global enterprise. But the signal is still fascinating. Companies are saying use AI, and employees are saying, "Okay, how?" So they figure it out themselves. They buy tool themselves, they experiment themselves, and then organizations wonder why they end up with disconnected tools, inconsistent practices, and very little measurement. And that's not really a technology problem, but that's really a leadership problem The future CMO is not a person with the most tools. this brings me back to the future of the CMO role. I don't believe that a future CMO needs to know every tool. That is impossible anyway. The tools will change, the platforms will change, the features will change. What the future CMO needs is the ability to connect the pieces, business goals, customer needs, marketing technology, people, trust, and measuring outcomes. The CMO increasingly becomes a orchestrator, not a person playing every instrument. The

Trust Risks And The Training Gap

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person who understands what music we are trying to create, who needs to play what, and whether the audience actually wants to hear it. That's a very different leadership role And AI accelerates that shift. So what does this report really tell us? For me, the big message isn't marketers are using more AI. We already knew that. The more interesting message is we have moved from an adoption problem to a leadership problem. We know how to create faster. Now we need to decide what deserves to be created. We know how to automate more. Now we need to decide what should remain human. We know how to increase productivity. Now we need to connect productivity to value. We know how to produce more content. Now we need a point of view strong enough to deserve attention. And we know AI is going to become more powerful. So trust, judgment, and responsibility become more important, not less So here's a question I would leave with every CMO, founder, and marketer listening.

The One Question To Ask

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Don't ask how much AI are we using? Ask, what are we able to do better because of AI? Better for the customer, better for the business, better for the team, better for the brand? Because if the only answer is we are producing more, then I don't think you're done yet. The AI adoption race is ending. The AI leadership race is beginning, and I believe that is where the real competitive advantage will be built a big thank you to Michael Stelzner and the Social Media Examiner team for putting this research together. I've only touched on a handful of findings here. The full 2026 AI Marketing Industry Report goes much deeper, and I linked it in the show notes. Michael, if you're listening, thanks for giving us data worth thinking about, not just data worth reporting. And for everyone else listening, I'm curious what you think. Is AI making your marketing better or mostly faster? If this episode made you think of another marketer, founder, or CMO, share it with them. If you're not yet following Web3 CMO Stories, well, this is the moment for, to do that. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time. Take care.