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It’s not hard for marketers to adopt AI. They are having trouble making it work.
An Optimizely survey of more than 2,000 B2B marketers worldwide found that nearly half say AI is fully integrated into their daily work. Yet most also spend hours each week fixing AI results, moving from one disconnected tool to another, and compensating for processes that haven’t kept pace with adoption.
The report highlights an operational rather than technological challenge. AI has become part of everyday marketing, but the governance, workflows, and technology infrastructure needed to support it are still catching up.
The promise of AI was greater efficiency. The reality is more complicated.
Three-quarters of respondents spend at least three hours each week editing, proofing or proofreading AI-generated content. Hallucinations, manual copy-pasting between disconnected tools, and legal or compliance reviews consume much of that time. Only 4% said AI saves time throughout the content creation process.
AI created new work instead of eliminating it
The burden seems particularly heavy outside the United States. While only 4% of global marketers say AI saves time at every stage of the content process, U.S. marketers expressed significantly greater confidence in AI results. Thirty-nine percent said most AI-generated content is usable without significant modification, compared to 28% globally.
The results show that AI has not so much eliminated work as displaced it. Content generation takes less time, but quality control, governance, and coordination require more attention.
Much of this additional work appears to be related to the technology stack itself.
Only 19% of respondents use a single integrated AI platform. More than 80% regularly switch between multiple AI applications, creating disconnected workflows that force marketers to manually transfer information between systems.
Fragmented technology amplifies the problem
These disconnected environments make consistent AI governance more difficult. Teams spend more time verifying results, maintaining compliance, and ensuring information is consistent across systems instead of creating better customer experiences.
The report does not establish that fragmentation directly causes these results, but the results show that they occur simultaneously in organizations that adopt AI.
The survey also reveals that AI continues to clash with one of marketing’s key responsibilities: preserving brand identity.
More than half of respondents said AI captures factual information but does not reflect the emotional tone of their brand. Only about a third expressed high confidence that their AI tools consistently reflect their brand voice.
Brand governance remains a human responsibility
American marketers were more optimistic. Forty-five percent said they were very confident that AI captured the emotional resonance of their brand, compared to around a third globally. Despite this, 62% of US respondents still express concern that AI is contributing to increasingly similar brand voices.
The concern extends beyond individual pieces of content. Fifteen percent of respondents said their AI-generated work would be difficult to distinguish from a competitor’s if the brand was removed, while two-thirds expressed concern that AI was contributing to increasingly similar brand voices.
The results reinforce that content generation is only part of the workflow. Maintaining differentiation always depends on editorial oversight, governance and well-managed branding systems.
Leaders and practitioners see AI differently
The report also reveals a notable gap between leaders and the people who use AI every day.
More than half of marketers said executives underestimate the human effort required by AI. Surveyed executives are significantly more likely than analysts to describe themselves as liberated by AI and to say their organization’s implementation is fully aligned.
The survey also revealed behavioral differences. Forty-four percent of executives surveyed said they frequently or always submitted AI-generated work without disclosing it, while a quarter of marketers admitted to publishing AI-generated content that they knew was off-brand to meet deadlines. In the United States, this figure rises to one in three.
Rather than pointing the finger at isolated governance failures, the findings show the operational pressure marketers face as AI adoption grows faster than the processes behind it.
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Adoption is no longer the challenge
Perhaps the report’s most striking finding is that 65% of marketers would consider pausing AI deployment for 90 days to rethink their approach. Only 35% believe their current implementation is on track.
As with any vendor-sponsored research, results reflect marketers’ perceptions rather than independently measured productivity. Even so, they point to a consistent theme. Marketing organizations have widely adopted AI. The most difficult challenge is putting in place the governance, integrated technology, and operating model needed to make AI trustworthy at scale.
For enterprise marketers, competitive advantage no longer comes from adopting AI. This comes from its operationalization.
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