AI is transforming how organizations generate insights and forecast outcomes, but questions remain about reliability and the need for human oversight. On September 14-15 in NYC, industry and academic leaders gathered to discuss integrating AI into analytics workflows and maintaining transparency.
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Generative AI is changing how advertising creative is developed—but not by replacing human creativity. Drawing on interviews with industry leaders and a broad review of emerging research, this ARF Creative Council white paper examines how AI is being used across the creative process, from briefing and ideation to personalization and optimization. It explores where AI delivers the greatest value today, the risks organizations continue to navigate and why human judgment remains central to producing distinctive, effective advertising.
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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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As generative AI becomes more deeply embedded in advertising, understanding its implications requires looking at both how marketers are adopting it and how consumers are responding. On July 22, the ARF brought these perspectives together through presentations from the ARF and Humantel Media, followed by a broader discussion.
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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As consumers add AI-powered search engines to their information routines, their behavior changes with the platform and purpose of the search. An observational study of 848 real-world searches found that traditional search still dominated while AI-powered search was used more often for advice-seeking, drew substantially longer queries and produced fewer outbound clicks. The findings suggest that advertisers may need to rethink long-tail keyword strategies, website optimization and ad models as search behavior becomes divided across traditional and generative platforms.
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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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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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