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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Generative AI is becoming an active participant in the purchase journey, helping consumers compare products, interpret information and select among alternatives. Based on a survey of 500 adults who use AI at least weekly and have used it for shopping or product research, the latest report in the ARF and MSI Psych of Gen AI series examines how much of the decision process consumers are willing to delegate, where they still insist on control and what their growing reliance on AI means for marketers.
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AI-optimized, omnichannel campaigns are changing how media are planned, activated and measured. Drawing on in-depth interviews with advertisers and providers, the ARF Cross-Platform Measurement Council’s Attribution Working Group examined omnichannel campaign tools such as Google Performance Max and Meta Advantage+, exploring their potential to simplify execution, optimize across channels and improve performance. Their research also identified important tradeoffs, including transparency, testing capabilities and ongoing measurement and governance challenges.
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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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