Almost every marketing team we meet is already using AI. Very few have changed how the work actually gets done. The gap is not curiosity and it is not budget.
It stalls in three places
Nobody owns it. Everyone experiments, no one is accountable for the outcome, so nothing survives contact with a busy quarter.
There is no defined use case. “Use AI more” is too vague to act on. “Cut the time from research to a defensible market sizing” can be worked against.
There is no method. A tool applied without a method produces output nobody trusts enough to act on, which is worse than no output at all.
What changes it
Pick one stage of the cycle. Define what good looks like at that stage before touching a tool. Then apply the tool, and check the result the way you would check a junior colleague’s work: against the assumptions underneath it.
The teams that get somewhere change one part of the job, prove it, and move to the next.