Marketers appear to have already drawn a mental line for how far AI should go, and that line separates execution from strategy almost perfectly. A survey of 600 marketers scored ten marketing functions on a scale from mostly human to mostly AI, and the results form a clear pattern. Personalization, research, and data analysis all score close to mostly AI, while customer relationships, creative direction, and strategic planning all score close to mostly human.

Essential Statistics

• Personalization scores 4.9, the highest AI-leaning score measured, close to fully mostly AI.
• Research scores 4.8, and reporting scores 4.7, both close behind.
• Creative direction scores 0.8, the most human-leaning score measured.
• Customer relationships scores 1.2, and strategic planning scores 1.4, both firmly human-leaning.
• Content production scores 3.9, and media optimization scores 3.8, both leaning toward AI but less decisively than personalization or research.

Key Takeaways

• Personalization scoring nearly the maximum AI-leaning score suggests marketers see this function as the clearest candidate for full AI ownership, likely because it depends heavily on processing large volumes of data quickly.
• Creative direction and customer relationships scoring firmly on the human side suggests marketers still see genuine judgment and interpersonal connection as areas where AI adds the least value relative to a human.
• Strategic planning scoring close to fully human suggests marketers are drawing a clear line between using AI to execute a strategy and trusting AI to set that strategy in the first place.
• Content production and media optimization landing in the middle suggests these functions are seen as partially AI-suited but still benefiting meaningfully from human input.
• This overall pattern suggests marketers expect AI’s role to expand primarily in execution-heavy, data-driven functions, while strategic and relationship-driven functions remain anchored to human judgment.

Actionable Insights

• Shift more of your personalization, research, and reporting workflows toward AI-driven processes, since these functions show the strongest marketer consensus that AI is ready to take the lead here.
• Keep creative direction and customer relationship management firmly under human ownership, since these functions show the strongest resistance to AI involvement in this data.
• Treat strategic planning as a human-led function even as you expand AI use elsewhere, since marketers clearly separate execution tasks from strategic ones in how they view AI’s appropriate role.
• Use content production and media optimization as pilot areas for testing a deeper AI and human blend, since these functions land in the middle of this data rather than at either extreme.
• Communicate this human-versus-AI split clearly to your team so expectations about AI’s role match what this data suggests marketers broadly agree on, rather than letting individual comfort levels with AI drive inconsistent internal policy.

‘Marketers already know where they want AI. Personalization, research, reporting, hand it over. Strategy and relationships, keep those human. That split isn’t going to blur as much as people think.’ – Neil Patel