future state

A Year Inside the Psychology of GenAI: What ARF Research Reveals About How AI Thinks

  • Psychology of GenAI
  • ARF; MSI

After conducting eight studies over the past year, what has the ARF learned about the psychology of generative AI? Across experiments examining bias, identity cues, product recommendations, executive decision-making and AI-assisted research, four patterns repeatedly emerged: GenAI tends to compress human variability into dominant responses, subtle differences in prompting can meaningfully change outputs, different models bring their own constraints and tendencies and AI can imitate the language of expertise more readily than it can exercise expert judgment. Taken together, the studies suggest that GenAI’s greatest strength and its greatest risk may be the same: its ability to produce coherent, convincing answers can make compression, instability and missing judgment difficult to see.

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Beyond the Hype: How AI Is Reshaping Modern Marketing

  • ARF ORIGINAL RESEARCH

Artificial intelligence has rapidly become part of the everyday marketing toolkit, transforming everything from creative development and campaign measurement to analytics and customer engagement. Drawing on two nationwide surveys of more than 200 U.S. advertisers and agencies, this new ARF study explores where AI adoption stands today, which tools marketers rely on most, how organizations are validating AI outputs and the governance practices emerging as AI becomes central to marketing operations.

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From AI Adoption to AI Accountability: What Comes Next for Advertisers

  • ARF; The Advertising Club of New York

Artificial intelligence is becoming deeply embedded in advertising and marketing, but adoption alone is no longer the story. In this guest article for The Advertising Club of New York, ARF Senior Director of Research & Insights Tracy Adams examines findings from the ARF's latest AI research, which reveals that while organizations are increasingly confident in AI-generated outputs, many are still developing the testing, governance and measurement practices needed to ensure those outputs deliver meaningful business value.