Invoca, the leader in revenue execution, today released The Marketing AI Impact Report, revealing a significant gap between how marketers believe AI is shaping customer experience and how consumers actually feel about it. While 86% of marketers say AI is improving the buying experience, only 35% of consumers agree, underscoring a growing disconnect as organizations accelerate AI adoption across the customer journey.
But this perception doesn’t match how most organizations are actually equipped to use AI today. Beneath this confidence lies a more challenging operational reality: many organizations still lack the data infrastructure and activation capabilities needed to fully realize AI’s potential.
The Urgency Driving Rapid, Risk-Prone AI Adoption
The survey reveals that B2C marketers are operating under rising expectations:
- 81% believe the AI leaders in their category will emerge in the next 12 months
- 80% say leadership is pressuring them to deliver measurable AI wins
- 90% plan to increase AI investment over the next year
This competitive pressure helps explain why marketers’ optimism about AI’s impact often outpaces their operational readiness. When forced to choose, 56% of marketers said they would prioritize speed over customer experience, accepting the risk of brand damage rather than falling behind competitors in AI adoption.
At the same time, 74% acknowledge that rushing AI deployment can impact customer experience, yet 84% remain confident their own organization can scale AI quickly without causing disruption. This combination of urgency and optimism underscores the importance of grounding AI strategy in operational readiness rather than perception.
Valuable Conversation Data Is Underutilized, Limiting AI Performance
The report highlights a core execution challenge: utilizing first-party conversation data to enhance AI optimization.
Although first-party conversational data represents the most unfiltered source of customer intent — revealing true needs, objections, and purchase drivers — only 37% of organizations currently tap into the rich data in call recordings and transcripts for AI applications, leaving the majority sitting on a goldmine of untapped buyer signals and competitive insights.
Compounding the issue, marketers also face data latency issues with unstructured conversation data, with most taking two to seven days to take action on new insights. This lag limits the effectiveness of AI-driven automation systems that rely on fresh, high-quality signals to optimize marketing performance, as all AI is only as good as the data that feeds it.
“AI is fundamentally changing how brands connect with their customers,” said Peter Isaacson, CMO of Invoca. “The companies that lead won’t be the ones that simply adopt AI the fastest, but the ones that connect first-party data, AI insights, and human engagement into a single, real-time system that delivers the customer experience today’s buyers expect. The next era of marketing belongs to brands that can turn every customer interaction into intelligence, and every insight into revenue.”
When Marketers’ Perceptions Diverge From Customer Reality
The research reveals a clear gap between how marketers view AI performance and how consumers actually experience it:
- 85% of marketers believe consumers feel positive about AI-powered interactions, but only 37% of consumers agree*
- 86% of marketers say AI is improving the buying experience, compared with just 35% of consumers*
- 49% of marketers believe consumers prefer AI for complex tasks, while only 30% of consumers trust AI in those scenarios*
This discrepancy highlights the importance of validating AI strategy and deployment against actual customer preferences, rather than relying on internal assumptions.
Four Imperatives for Marketing Leadership
The report outlines four strategic priorities to help organizations close these gaps:
- Establish objective competitive benchmarks to counter overconfidence and ground AI strategy in market reality.
- Align AI investment with strategic importance, ensuring budgets support the capabilities needed to reach growth targets.
- Prioritize insight-to-action workflows, especially real-time activation of first-party conversational data using AI.
- Validate AI initiatives using actual customer data, not internal perceptions of customer sentiment.
For more such updates, follow us on Google News Martech News
