Artificial intelligence has moved beyond experimentation and into everyday marketing operations, according to new research from AI marketing platform Kana. The company's latest study found that 70% of large enterprises are already running custom AI agents in production, signalling that the industry's focus has shifted from whether to adopt AI to how organisations govern and scale it effectively.
The report, titled The Agentic Divide, surveyed 225 senior marketing, AI and data leaders at U.S. enterprises with annual revenue exceeding $250 million. It suggests that while agentic AI adoption has accelerated rapidly, many organisations are still grappling with questions around ownership, governance and operational readiness.
According to the findings, only 3% of respondents said their organisations have not adopted AI in marketing. The remaining respondents reported using AI agents across functions such as campaign optimisation, customer engagement, audience segmentation and marketing decision making. Researchers say the market has effectively moved beyond pilot projects, with AI agents now performing real marketing tasks inside production environments.
The survey also identified organisational ownership as one of the biggest unresolved issues. Overall, 40% of respondents believe the Chief AI Officer should oversee agentic marketing strategy and execution. Among AI leaders, support for Chief AI Officer ownership rises to 52%, while marketing executives are more likely to favour either the Chief Marketing Officer or a shared governance model. The report argues that uncertainty around accountability could slow enterprise adoption even as AI capabilities continue to expand.
Another key finding highlights a gap between enterprise confidence and operational reality. While 86% of respondents described their data infrastructure as ready for AI adoption and 76% said their governance frameworks could support supervised AI decisions, many also identified data governance and data quality as leading barriers to broader deployment. The report suggests organisations may be overestimating their preparedness for fully autonomous marketing systems.
Competitive pressure is also emerging as a major driver of investment. Nearly 69% of respondents said the risk of falling behind competitors outweighs concerns related to privacy, security or compliance when deciding whether to invest in AI marketing technologies. Meanwhile, 82% expect AI agents to manage at least one third of routine marketing decisions within the next two years, and almost half believe AI will handle the majority of those decisions during that period.
Despite differing opinions on governance, respondents largely agreed on where AI agents deliver the greatest value. Marketing, AI and data leaders all ranked real time personalised customer engagement and autonomous cross channel campaign optimisation among the top enterprise use cases. The report indicates that disagreement centres on accountability rather than on practical applications.
Kana Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Tom Chavez said enterprises are no longer debating whether agentic marketing is real. Instead, they are determining where AI agents should operate and how they should be governed. According to Chavez, the next stage of enterprise AI adoption will be defined by organisations that establish robust governance structures rather than those that simply deploy AI more quickly.
The findings reflect a broader trend across enterprise software, where AI agents are increasingly evolving from productivity assistants into systems capable of monitoring campaigns, generating insights, recommending actions and executing workflows with limited human intervention. As organisations continue integrating AI across marketing operations, governance, transparency and accountability are expected to become as important as the technology itself.