Tenth Edition State of Marketing

Marketing is going through a seismic shift. Rapid advances in AI, rising customer expectations, expanding data ecosystems, and increasing pressure to deliver measurable impact are reshaping how marketing organisations operate, invest, and grow. Across industries and regions, teams are redefining how they engage customers, make decisions, and deliver value.

This report reflects insights from a double-blind survey of 4,450 marketing professionals across 26 countries and six continents. As organisations build their foundations for agentic AI and more autonomous, data-driven engagement, this research captures how marketers are responding to structural change across strategy, technology, and execution.

To understand how organisations are experiencing this transformation, respondents are grouped into three performance tiers based on their satisfaction with marketing investment outcomes:

Together, these perspectives provide a global view of how marketing is evolving in practice. They offer context on how peers are adapting, where organizations are gaining confidence, and how the industry is progressing through a period of sustained transformation.

Pressure is building across the funnel: Expectations among existing customers are rising (85%) while new-customer acquisition is getting harder (69%).

Despite these rising demands, execution of personalized content is lagging behind. Over half of marketers (51%) say their campaigns sometimes feel generic, while 37% report inconsistent messaging. This shows a gap between the high bar set by customers and the reality of current marketing efforts.

Implementing AI and adapting to its impact rank as both the top priorities and top challenges for marketers. This shows the tension of this moment: Marketers want to take advantage of AI benefits such as efficiency and personalization at scale, but doing it isn’t like flipping a switch. Building a solid data foundation and onboarding new AI tools takes work and strategy.

Close behind AI are the usual priorities of operational efficiency and proving ROI, showing the constant reevaluation of internal processes and how metrics are measured and delivered.

With AI's impact being felt across marketing organisations, the scope of the chief marketing officer (CMO) continues to expand, with 86% of marketers agreeing the position's responsibilities are getting broader. CMOs are now personally accountable for an average of six distinct functional areas, ranging from traditional brand and product marketing to more technical domains such as analytics, data strategy, and revenue operations.

Although priorities and challenges are consistent themes impacting marketers and their organisations, there are variances based on local geography and organisations. For a deeper dive into what this looks like for your business, check out the interactive dashboard below.

Brands are on board with AI as a whole, with 75% of marketing organisations now using at least one form of it for tasks like personalising content, predicting campaign performance, or generating visuals.

Thirteen percent of marketers say they currently use agentic AI, and the new technology is rapidly becoming a hallmark of top-performing teams. High-performing marketers are nearly twice as likely as underperformers to use AI agents. In fact, 82% of marketers who use or plan to use agents expect major or moderate improvements to marketing ROI.

When AI is deployed, marketers are seeing clear gains:

+20% increase in marketing ROI
+20% increase in customer satisfaction
+19% increase in conversion rates
-19% decrease in marketing costs

The promise of AI isn't just about speed — it's expanded capacity. Marketers expect to reclaim eight hours per week through AI agents, reinvesting that time into high-value creative work. As a result, marketers with AI agents report significantly more time for developing deeper customer insights and experimenting with new channels or tactics, compared to those without agents.

The survey also showed that employee attrition was largely unaffected by AI and AI agent use. Attrition was 14% for marketing organisations without AI and 16% for ones that have it.

While basic AI adoption is high, full integration remains a work in progress for 61% of marketers. (Full integration refers to AI tools being built into or seamlessly connected with the rest of the brand’s marketing technology.)

Privacy and data security are the top concerns regarding AI implementation, with AI accuracy ranking second. Both indicate that additional education and fine-tuning are needed before agentic AI use is widespread.

For those yet to adopt AI, the primary blocker is maturity, both of the technology and the team. Marketers cite “waiting for AI to mature” and “lack of employee expertise” as the top reasons for delay.

AI is forcing marketers to rethink how they approach customer engagement. Change has always been the name of the SEO game, but AI is transforming it more than ever by displaying comprehensive answers without the user having to click through to a brand website. As a result, 85% of marketers say they are reshaping their SEO strategy and 88% are in the process of optimizing for AI-driven search experiences like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overview (AIO).

While SEO is top of mind, marketers cite social media as the top marketing channel impacted by AI. However, almost half of marketers say they haven’t figured out how to adapt their strategies to the broad use of AI.

As AI tools and strategies evolve, marketers are looking to upskill both in technical and nontechnical areas. Marketers rank data analysis and interpretation and AI tool management as the two most important skills as AI use grows.

As marketers adjust to this new search reality, many are also expanding how they use AI across day-to-day marketing execution. The most common applications include personalizing content at scale, predicting customer behavior, and forecasting campaign performance or ROI to improve planning and decision-making. AI is also increasingly used to accelerate production through copy generation and visual creation, helping teams move faster while focusing human effort on strategy, measurement, and optimization.

AI is impacting a broad array of marketing-owned channels and strategies, but the differences across industries, verticals, and geography can vary. Use this interactive chart to learn what's impacting specific industries and regions.

Agentic marketing is powered by a unified view of the customer across the business. For example, an AI agent can't autonomously resolve a customer issue or recommend a product if it can't see the customer's recent service history or abandoned cart order.

The average marketing org uses at least seven data sources. While slightly more than half of marketers have access to real-time data for segmentation, campaign execution, and analytics, one-third say data for those activities is delayed.

Marketers face gaps in data that makes a unified view hard to piece together. While a majority have at least partial access to data from sales, commerce, and service teams, full access is not as common:

• Only 58% of marketing teams have full access to service data.
• Only 56% of marketing teams have full access to sales data.
• Only 51% of marketing teams have full access to commerce data.

While 71% of marketers are satisfied with their ability to connect these touchpoints, only 26% are completely satisfied. Overall, only one in four marketers is completely satisfied with how they are unifying data and using customer data to create relevant experiences. This can have implications for AI agents as well. Unified data provides agents with the context they need to execute their work.

Marketers who use AI agents are more likely to express satisfaction with their organisations' ability to connect customer experiences across touchpoints. This could be related to preparatory work done to optimise for agents (such as fortifying the data foundation or upskilling teams on new tools) or to improvements brought by the AI itself.

Marketers are getting more sophisticated in how they define audiences. While purchase history and demographic data remain standard, the new best practice is using data to look ahead. Forty-one per cent of marketers with AI say they use predicted behaviour to segment audiences, versus 30% of marketers without AI. This shift from looking back (history) to looking forward (prediction) is a feature of the new marketing era that can make decisions based on user intent.

Marketers have always been metrics-minded, and there is a focus on tracking value, refining performance and driving sales forward. The most common marketing KPIs align directly with the sales organisation, reflecting an effort to reduce siloed work, provide a cohesive experience for customers, and build a loyal audience that will stay with the business over the long term.

This focus on revenue accountability is most pronounced among high performers. Eighty-three per cent of marketers report having a clear view into their impact on the sales pipeline.

Brands need to meet customers where they are. That's been a marketing mantra for a while, and it's finally coming to fruition. On average, companies market across 10 channels, and marketers who can successfully engage customers in real time across channels are more likely to be high performers.

While 83% of marketers agree that customers increasingly want two-way conversations, making that happen is a work in progress.

Sixty-nine per cent of marketers admit they struggle to respond promptly to customer and prospect inquiries. While email and SMS remain staples of the marketing mix, they are often treated as broadcast-only ('do not reply') channels. Only 55% of marketers say they frequently reply to customer responses via email and SMS, a process that is currently manual.

Leading marketing organisations are closing this gap between customer expectation and reality. High-performing teams are 1.5x more likely to frequently reply to customers via email and text compared with under performers.

Confidence in new technology is rising, as 81% of marketers say they trust AI to respond to customer inquiries. This signals a breakthrough where agents handle two-way interactions 24/7 in a way that humans alone can't do.

Marketers know that personalisation at scale is crucial to success, but achieving that has been hard. Seventy-eight per cent of marketers say they need more personalised content than they are currently able to produce. Fixing their data is a key to improvement.

Marketers are focusing their deepest personalisation efforts on high-engagement, high-frequency channels like mobile messaging and paid search. Conversely, audio and website experiences lag behind, remaining the least likely to be personalised to the individual.

While 48% of marketers say they haven't figured out how to adapt marketing strategies to the broad use of AI, this is an opportunity for customer-facing agents to pick up the pace for channels lagging, like the web.

Nearly half of marketing teams (46%) report challenges with “lacking data on customer preferences” and “struggling to provide content relevant to customer needs.”

Ninety-eight percent of marketers with AI report at least one barrier to personalization, with the top obstacles being:

The blockers are mainly data-related, but also privacy remains an issue. Marketers say strict privacy regulations limit their ability to use data for personalization. Quality control at scale is another concern.

To sum up, marketers are seeing a major shift as agentic AI capabilities evolve and new ways to personalize messaging and make internal processes more efficient become possible. However, there are still obstacles to overcome before most organizations can fully activate these capabilities. Marketers have an important year ahead as they navigate these challenges on their way to actualizing improved productivity and personalization at scale.

This research is based on a global survey of 4,450 marketing professionals conducted between October 8 and November 17, 2025. Respondents represent a broad mix of industries, company sizes, seniority levels, and business models across North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. Participants were required to be directly involved in marketing strategy, execution, or technology decisions within their organization to qualify for inclusion.

The study was administered using a double-blind methodology: participants were not informed that Salesforce commissioned the research, and Salesforce does not have access to the identity of individual respondents beyond the qualification criteria. A stratified sampling approach was used to ensure balanced representation by region, industry, and company size.

Data was weighted where necessary to align with global distributions of marketing roles and business types. With a sample of 4,450 respondents, the results carry an approximate margin of error of plus or minus 1.5 percentage points at a 95% confidence level.

Unless otherwise noted, all charts and findings reflect the full respondent base. Percentages are rounded to the nearest whole number, and as a result totals may not always sum to exactly 100%. Performance analysis throughout the report classifies organisations into high, moderate, and underperforming tiers based on respondents' self-reported satisfaction with the outcomes of their marketing investments, enabling comparisons across behaviours, strategies, and technology adoption.

The blockers are mainly data-related, but also privacy remains an issue. Marketers say strict privacy regulations limit their ability to use data for personalisation. Quality control at scale is another concern.

This appendix provides a single PDF with every chart from the Tenth State of Marketing report. It serves as a simple visual companion to the chapters and findings presented in the main report.

Open the chart appendix


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