The AI landscape doesn't move in one direction — it lurches. Some techniques leap from experiment to table stakes in a single quarter; others stall against regulatory walls, technical ceilings, or organisational inertia that no amount of hype can dislodge. Knowing which is which is the hard part. The State of Play cuts through the noise with a rigorously maintained index of AI techniques across every major business domain — classified by maturity, evidenced by real-world adoption, and updated daily so you always know where you stand relative to the field. Stop guessing. Start knowing.
A daily newsletter distilling the past two weeks of movement in a domain or two — delivered to your inbox while the index updates in the background.
Each dot marks the weighted maturity of practices within a domain — hover for a brief summary, click for more detail
AI for creating, distributing, and measuring content across channels. The most mature creative domain: SEO, copywriting, email, and social media management are established practice. Personalisation at scale and sentiment-driven strategy are advancing but unevenly adopted. Content authenticity and deepfake detection remain bleeding-edge.
The headline: Almost every marketing team now uses AI, but only a shrinking minority can show it makes money — and the gap between the disciplined few who profit and the volume-chasing many who don't has stopped closing.
This is the most AI-saturated corner of the business. Roughly 9 in 10 marketers use generative AI (tools that produce text, images, or video from a prompt) every day, and marketing is now the top AI-adoption function in the whole enterprise. So being "in" on AI buys you nothing — everyone is. The question that now separates winners from losers is whether you have the discipline to make it pay: documented brand standards, a person reviewing each output before it ships (human-in-the-loop), and real measurement. The minority who do this report concrete returns — one retailer lifted revenue 102 percent, another firm saved 10,000 staff hours a year. The majority who simply pumped out more content got nothing, and many got punished: more than half of sites that scaled unreviewed AI content lost a third or more of their search traffic within a year. If you are not measuring outcomes and gating quality, you are almost certainly in the losing group, whatever your activity dashboards say.
New disclosure laws are now live, not pending. New York's law requiring brands to disclose AI-generated human likenesses took effect 9 June, and the EU's AI transparency rules hit their compliance deadline on 2 August. Mandatory disclosure is not free — labelling AI content cuts ad effectiveness by roughly a third, and shoppers tend to skip past labelled content rather than trust it more. Get legal and marketing aligned on what you must disclose before the August deadline, because the cost is real on both sides.
Regulators are now fining companies for overclaiming AI, too. The FTC settled with a media firm for $930,000 over marketing a non-AI service as "AI-powered," and imposed 20 years of monitoring — establishing that calling something "AI-powered" is now a claim you must be able to prove. Audit your own marketing copy and vendor pitches for AI-washing before someone else does.
The proof-of-return number got worse. An industry survey put adoption at 91 percent but the share able to prove a return at just 41 percent, down from 49 percent a year ago. Adoption is rising while confidence in the payoff is falling — a sign the problem is execution, not access, and that more spending on tools alone will not fix it.
A widely used marketing-intelligence tool was breached. Attackers harvested access tokens from the competitive-intelligence platform Klue, exposing data from eight-plus customer environments, and Salesforce disabled the integration. Treat connected AI tools as part of your security perimeter — they now concentrate customer and pricing data into attractive targets.
The EU AI Act disclosure deadline (2 August). Any AI-generated public-facing content in regulated markets needs visible labelling with genuine human oversight — "a quick skim" is explicitly not enough. Map which of your content this covers and assign accountable owners now; this is weeks away, not quarters.
Search traffic will keep draining as AI answers replace clicks. Two-thirds of US Google searches now end without a click, and most AI-driven traffic is invisible in standard analytics. Your old traffic and ranking reports are quietly becoming unreliable. Push your team toward a measurement approach that tracks influenced pipeline and AI-citation share, not just clicks — the brands rebuilding measurement early are the ones still able to prove value.
Consumer trust in AI content keeps falling, making authenticity a competitive asset. Only about a third of consumers trust AI-generated content, and human-made work increasingly out-earns it on engagement. Decide where your brand visibly keeps a human voice — that choice is becoming a differentiator, not a cost.
The gap is about discipline, not technology. The tools work; only about 6 percent of teams have them genuinely embedded with the review gates and measurement that produce returns. Buying better software does not close this gap — building governance does, and that is slow, unglamorous work.
Honest AI use has no clean path at scale. Disclose, and performance drops while audiences tune out the label; don't disclose, and you risk fines. There is no setting that is both fully compliant and fully effective, so the realistic answer is selective, human-supervised use rather than autonomous volume.
AI is weakest exactly where marketing value is highest. It excels at high-volume, low-stakes output and stalls on emotional resonance, cultural nuance, and authentic perspective — and it cannot reliably tell a real creator from a synthetic one, with influencer fraud still running near 41 percent of profiles despite AI vetting. The human premium sits precisely where the judgment is hardest to automate.
Go deeper: the full Content & Marketing briefing — the longer analytical write-up, plus every practice we track in this domain with its maturity rating, the tools to consider, and the evidence behind our assessment.