StackAdapt’s AI Delegation Gap: 90%+ Marketers Use AI, But Only Half Trust Autonomous AI

by ExchangeWire PressBox on 21st Aug 2026 in News

StackAdapt, the leading AI advertising and orchestration platform, unveils The AI Delegation Gap, a global report examining how marketers are redefining the role of artificial intelligence in advertising.

While AI adoption has become mainstream, the findings suggest a gap between ambition and readiness. Advertisers are open to AI recommendations, with a majority acting on platform recommendations often or almost always in EMEA. But, their openness doesn’t mean advertisers are ready to delegate blindly: less than a quarter of EMEA respondents say they’re very confident evaluating whether AI is making the right campaign decisions and only half are comfortable using Autonomous AI, leading them to act selectively when recommendations lack campaign-specific rationale, strategic relevance or clear KPI connection.

Based on a survey of 500 marketing and advertising professionals across EMEA, North America, and APAC, in addition to insights from 187 global StackAdapt customers, the report found that despite an overwhelming majority of marketers in EMEA using AI in marketing or advertising, there is a say-versus-do attitude beneath the surface. Globally, marketers are using AI regularly or for most tasks and report AI-driven performance improvements, but there is a growing difference between marketers’ willingness to use AI and their willingness to delegate greater authority to it. StackAdapt explains this as The AI Delegation Gap.

Key findings include:

AI adoption has become mainstream. Adoption of AI in marketing or advertising is consistent across APAC (92%), North America (91%) and EMEA (90%), underscoring that AI has become a global standard across advertising organisations.
Marketers want AI to support decisions, not replace them. 90% of global respondents are comfortable with AI recommending actions and 89% support AI preparing actions for human approval. Comfort declines to 78% when AI acts within human-defined rules and falls to 50% for autonomous AI, even when performance has been proven.
Trust is earned through transparency and control. Brand risk (63%), data quality concerns (56%) and lack of transparency (36%) are the biggest barriers to delegating more authority to AI globally. Marketers are more likely to act on AI recommendations when they include clear explanations, connect directly to campaign goals and provide confidence that actions can be tested or reversed.
AI is moving beyond reporting. Reporting and summaries (80%) and performance analysis (74%) are now the most common AI use cases. Rather than simply automating reports, marketers increasingly want AI to identify risks, explain performance changes and recommend what to do next.
Organisational readiness has become the next challenge. 80% of EMEA respondents feel moderate or strong pressure to increase AI usage, while 53% believe leadership expectations are ahead of their organisation's current readiness. Only 19% of global respondents say their AI tools are fully integrated into marketing and advertising workflows, highlighting the gap between AI ambition and operational readiness.

Ryan Nelsen, chief marketing officer at StackAdapt said: "AI adoption is no longer the question. Trust is. Marketers already rely on AI to accelerate workflows and surface insights, but they're also defining where human judgment remains essential, exposing a lack of trust."

He continued: "The EMEA market is hungry for proactive intelligence, but it might be grounded in strategic relevance above all else for advertisers and marketers to hand over the reins. The companies that close The AI Delegation Gap will be the ones that build the governance, confidence and operating models needed to let humans and AI make better decisions together."

The full AI Delegation Gap report is available to download [here].