AI Is Growing Faster Than Trust — Here's Where Marketers Go Next

Not long ago I came across a report full of statistics and figured I'd give it a casual skim to see what the marketing world has been buzzing about this year.

But as I worked through all 35 data points, the more I read, the harder it was to sit still.

The AI market is growing at a striking pace. Marketers themselves are charging in hard. And yet, on the other side, consumer confidence in "brands using AI" is not going up — it is going down, by 11 percentage points in a single year.

Here's the entire thing in one line: AI is running faster than trust.

That stings a little. But today I want to take that apart and explain what it really means.

First, work the numbers: how big is this cake, actually?

What exactly is the "AI marketing market"? In plain terms, it is "the total amount the world is willing to spend on AI."

Have a few numbers and get a feel for them yourself.

In 2020, the global AI market was 94.8 billion dollars. By 2031, it is forecast to reach 1.675 trillion dollars.

That is 17.7 times. In eleven years, this cake has grown nearly 18 times over.

The slice carved out just for marketing grew even faster. In 2020 it was only 12.05 billion dollars, and by 2028 it is projected to cross 107.5 billion.

Do the math: from just over 12 billion to over 100 billion is roughly nine times.

If you work in marketing, the cake is already at your fingertips. If you do not cut into it, the marketer next to you will.

Do not rush off just yet. A big market is only the backdrop. What really decides how you move are the three things below.

1. "Should I use AI?" — that question is already settled

Ask yourself this: how many marketers are actually using AI right now?

One January 2025 survey answered: 56%.

What does that mean? More than half of marketers — and then some — have already worked AI into their everyday routine. Of those, 17% run it end to end across many channels, and 39% use it in a few places first.

Who touches none of it? Just 13%.

When trends get ranked this year, the picture is even clearer — 70% of marketers call generative AI the consumer trend they care about most, ahead of connected TV and streaming.

So the first sentence I want to give you is this: "Whether to use it" is no longer the question. "Where to use it, and how far to trust it" — that is the real question.

2. Everyone is piling into the same place

So where, exactly, is it being used?

If you assume it's a free-for-all where everyone does their own thing, you'd be wrong. Line up the data and it looks oddly consistent.

The leader is content creation at 37%. Right behind it, email optimization at 36%. Social media management and ad placement at 35%. Content personalization at 33%.

Four numbers squeezed between 33 and 37 — almost sitting right on top of one another.

Look further down, and even KOL/influencer marketing is nearly fully adopted: 60% already use AI for influencer work, and natural language processing alone makes up about half of the tooling's usage — almost double that of machine learning.

Read it this way — everyone has picked up the very same hammer: First make the content, then spend on the ads. That is how everyone is charging right now.

3. One number is especially counter-intuitive

At this point, a lot of people would conclude: marketers really do love to tinker. But then look at the batch of data we scanned out ourselves, and you'll pause.

We swept across the public tech stacks of tens of millions of websites, counting "who actually has an AI tool mounted on their site."

The result? The most popular standalone AI tool we could track down only had about forty thousand active sites.

Now flip to the older guard: an email marketing platform like Mailchimp spans 310,000 sites; HubSpot, over 100,000.

So you'll notice: most AI isn't "a brand-new button you go out and buy." It's a switch you quietly turn on inside the platform you've been paying for all along.

That's the reverse warning: don't read "the number of independent AI tools is small" and conclude "marketers aren't using AI." They're using it, hard — it's just that the AI has long since moved quietly inside the platforms they reach for every day.

So before you make your move, don't rush to buy a new tool. First check the CRM, the inbox, and the customer-service tool you already pay for — is the AI switch not even flipped on yet?

4. But marketers themselves still have doubts

Don't assume that just because the outside is charging, the inside feels no fear at all.

Let me ask you: do you trust the conclusion AI hands you? The data says only 13% of marketers trust AI's judgment fully and skip a manual check. Everyone else — the vast majority — sits in a "believe it halfway, verify it again" grey zone.

It shows up even more bluntly in the money. For 47.6% of people, what they give to AI is under one-tenth of the entire marketing budget; the ones willing to stake 40% or more — just 19%.

Everyone is still dipping a toe with small money. Nobody is betting the whole farm.

So what is holding them back? First is data privacy, at 41%. Right behind it, the training time and effort, at 39%. Then "the AI tools are too many, but they don't talk to each other" — 34%, which is no longer a purely-trust problem but a making-them-work-together problem.

Then there's hallucination — the AI confidently inventing things — and 35% list that as the single biggest organizational blocker.

The most painful number sits at the end: marketers who worry AI will take their job have jumped from 35.6% all the way to 59.8%, up 24 points in one year. The more AI gets done, the more the people in the job worry about it.

It sounds contradictory — but that is the real marketing world today: running at full speed on one side, and shaking on the other.

5. On the consumer side, it's cooler still

Marketers, at least, are still charging forward. Consumers? They've cooled off faster.

Only 26% of consumers are willing to believe that "a brand will use AI responsibly." In one single year, the share of people comfortable with "a brand using AI" fell from 57% to 46%.

59% say the thing they find hardest to accept is that AI has stripped the "human touch" out of the brand. And 51% are uneasy about AI playing a virtual face in place of a real celebrity.

Do you see the pattern? The harder AI pushes into the "human" position, the more ground the consumer gives up.

The behind-the-scenes work — writing copy, slotting in ad placements — that they can just about tolerate, with nearly half saying it's fine.

That's the second wake-up call for marketers: Use AI loudly where it speeds you up — customer service, recommendations — and use it with restraint where a customer expects to see a real person.

6. And yet the money is going in, for real

We've spent a while dwelling on the jitters, but the wallet is honest.

Consumer spending on AI mobile apps rose from 380 million dollars in 2023 to 1.42 billion a year later — a jump of 274%. Consumers have started paying real money for AI, not just milking the free tier.

For brands that run on it, the returns are clear. McKinsey has estimated that deploying generative AI across marketing and sales can unlock incremental value on the order of 463 billion dollars a year — while shoring up 5% to 15% of total marketing spend in efficiencies.

So where does the money actually come back? Usually from the same few levers, and they all line up with the adoption rankings above:

• Personalization at scale. What used to take an entire CRM team to pull off "a thousand faces for a thousand customers" can now run in a single small team, using recommendations and custom content.
• Content production. Drafting, revising, localizing, plus AI-generated images and video — that's the single biggest lever, at 37%.
• Customer-service automation. Chatbots are both the tech industry's favorite and the speed-up consumers are most willing to pay for — a win for both sides.
• Prediction and precision advertising. Scoring sales leads and forecasting behavior — the approach B2B marketers rate as the most effective.
• Virtual try-ons. Beauty brands like L'Oréal have already embedded AI diagnosis and online try-ons straight into the buying path.

In a word, the ones who earn money aren't the people who crank out content the fastest. They're the ones willing to fold AI into a controlled, reproducible process — while still holding onto the brand's human touch and keeping a real person in the loop to review.

7. AI search could become the next gateway for traffic

And one last point I want to flag — an avenue that's easy to overlook.

The volume of pages AI assistants crawl now can go head-to-head with traditional search engines. In Q2 this year, of all the web-crawler requests, Googlebot ranked first at 27.49%, Anthropic's ClaudeBot leapt to second at 13.87%, and OpenAI's GPTBot also held 10.23%.

The kicker is what they use it for: of those AI crawlers, nearly 45% are feeding training and learning — only 9% are actually doing search. Meaning today's pages they pull are sent off to "train the brain," so that later, when they answer a buyer's question, they'll know who to point the buyer at.

So if you take the easy route and block GPTBot and ClaudeBot with a single line in robots.txt — congratulations: your brand has just handed the exposure slots inside future AI answers straight to your competitors.

Treat "whether an AI crawler can get in" as a marketing decision, not a purely IT one. Check whether you've over-blocked, and restructure your most important pages so someone can lift an answer straight out of them — in this era, whoever the AI mentions in its answer wins the exposure.

Putting all 35 data points together

By now, you should be able to line up three takeaways.

Takeaway one: adoption is already settled — the fight is now about integration. Most people have adopted the trend, and the question has gone from "whether to" to "how deep, and where."

Takeaway two: the bottleneck is people and organization, not just the technology. Hallucination, privacy, skill gaps, too many tools that don't talk to one another, the loss of the human touch, the fear of job loss — the genuine obstacles to AI doing more are these.

Takeaway three: the trust gap tears wider as deployment accelerates. Comfort dropped 11 points in a year, three-quarters of consumers feel uneasy about brands using AI, and they push back even harder when AI replaces a real person.

The teams that win the next phase won't be the fastest runners. They'll be the ones who built "the trust gap" into their design from the start — using AI to the fullest where it should be used, and keeping humans clearly in place where humans need to be.

When you actually get moving, the path isn't a detour: take stock of the AI you already have, choose a proven use case, keep a human in the loop, open the gate to the AI crawlers, and then keep an eye on "how many times this week our page was named."

The data is all right there. AI is growing fast — but whether people keep pace has always been the standing question of these years.

Here's hoping your brand is the one that puts AI in exactly the right place.