Marketing teams are balancing technology investment, artificial intelligence, customer trust, and pressure to prove growth. The statistics below draw on the Duke CMO Survey, Salesforce State of Marketing reports, and HubSpot marketing studies, with each measurement period identified.
Table of contents
- Martech spending and utilization
- Artificial intelligence adoption
- Personalization and connected customer data
- Budgets, brand building, and team growth
- Privacy and brand trust
- Community, social commerce, and creators
Martech spending and utilization
The Duke CMO Survey in 2024 found that companies spent 19.9% of their marketing budgets on marketing technology. Respondents expected that share to reach 30.9% in five years, suggesting that martech was viewed as a growing part of the marketing operating model rather than a temporary line item.
Investment, however, did not automatically translate into usage. Only 56.4% of purchased martech tools were being used in the same 2024 Duke CMO Survey. That gap is important for personal brands and career-focused businesses: adding another platform may be less valuable than improving adoption of the tools already in place.
Artificial intelligence was becoming part of that technology mix, but adoption varied by definition and use case. The Duke CMO Survey reported that companies were using generative AI in 7% of marketing activities in 2024. Only 10% of companies were using large language models, while 39.0% had still not used them. At the same time, 51% were evaluating or piloting large language models.
These figures describe different stages of adoption, not contradictory totals. A company could be testing an LLM without using it broadly, and a marketing team could use generative AI in a limited number of activities while its wider organization remained at an exploratory stage.
Artificial intelligence adoption
The Duke CMO Survey also recorded a later 2024 measure: 11% of all marketing operations used generative AI, up from 7% in Spring 2024. Marketers predicted that generative AI would be used in 34.5% of activities in three years. That forecast is an expectation, not a measured outcome.
HubSpot’s State of Marketing research for 2024 showed broader reported adoption. It found that 64% of marketers already used AI and automation, and 62% considered AI and automation important to marketing. Among non-users, 38% planned to adopt AI in 2024.
The role marketers imagined for AI was often assistive. In HubSpot’s 2024 data, 20% saw AI as taking over menial tasks, while 60% saw it as an assistant that helps across job duties. Among marketers using generative AI, 81% said it was effective at assisting their role.
Content production was another major use case. In HubSpot’s 2024 State of Marketing, 63% believed that most content in 2024 would be created at least partly with generative AI. Among marketers using generative AI for content creation, 56% said it performed better than non-AI content.
Chatbots were also part of the changing search and discovery environment. HubSpot reported that 55% of businesses predicted most people would turn to chatbots over search engines by 2024. The same study found that 36% of marketers used AI chatbots in their marketing role, and 58% planned to increase investments in AI and automation such as chatbots in 2024.
Strategy quality appeared to matter. Twenty-five percent of marketers with effective strategies used AI and automation such as chatbots, compared with 5% of ineffective marketers, according to HubSpot’s 2024 State of Marketing. In addition, 72% agreed that AI and automation tools helped personalize customer experiences.
Salesforce’s 9th State of Marketing study, published in 2024, surveyed more than 4,800 marketers across 29 countries. Its scale provides a broad international context for the adoption figures, while the Duke and HubSpot findings measure different respondent groups and research designs.
Personalization and connected customer data
Salesforce’s 10th State of Marketing research in 2026 described personalization as a widespread operational challenge. Ninety-eight percent of marketers said they hit barriers to personalization. Eighty-four percent confessed to running generic campaigns, and 78% needed more personalized content than they could produce.
Customer expectations were also changing. Salesforce reported that 83% of marketers said customers now expected two-way conversations. Yet 69% struggled to respond promptly because they could not access the needed context. The figures connect the experience problem to information access: responsiveness depends not only on messaging skill but also on whether a team can see relevant customer signals.
Access to data was incomplete across business functions. In Salesforce’s 2026 research, 58% of marketers had complete access to service data, 56% had complete access to sales data, and 51% had complete access to commerce data.
AI was one response to this personalization gap. Salesforce found that 75% of marketers were turning to AI to help close the gap between the content customers wanted and the content teams could produce. Among marketers with AI, 75% were satisfied with their ability to connect touchpoints. Satisfaction was 60% among marketers without AI, a 15-percentage-point difference in the reported measures.
The data does not establish that AI alone caused the difference. It does show that AI-equipped and non-AI-equipped groups reported different levels of satisfaction with connecting touchpoints, while both groups still operated within a broader personalization problem.
Budgets, brand building, and team growth
Budget pressure affected several marketing priorities in the Duke CMO Survey’s 2024 findings. Forty-five percent of marketing leaders reported inflationary spending pressures. When profits missed targets, executives would cut marketing expenses first 44.6% of the time.
The survey recorded a decline in selected investment shares. CRM investment fell from 6.2% to 3.9%, while brand-building spend fell from 5.5% to 3.9%. Marketing organization growth decreased to 3.9% from 5.5%.
Expectations for the near future were somewhat more positive. Marketers expected marketing organization growth to rise to 4.4% the following year. Separately, marketing departments grew their workforce by 5.3% in Fall 2024. The forecast and the measured workforce change refer to different time references, so they should not be treated as the same metric.
| Marketing measure | Reported figure | Period or reference |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing budget spent on martech | 19.9% | Duke CMO Survey, 2024 |
| Expected martech share | 30.9% | Five-year expectation, Duke CMO Survey, 2024 |
| CRM investment | 3.9% | Down from 6.2%, Duke CMO Survey, 2024 |
| Brand-building spend | 3.9% | Down from 5.5%, Duke CMO Survey, 2024 |
| Marketing organization growth | 3.9% | Down from 5.5%, Duke CMO Survey, 2024 |
| Expected marketing organization growth | 4.4% | Following year expectation, Duke CMO Survey, 2024 |
| Marketing department workforce growth | 5.3% | Fall 2024, Duke CMO Survey |
Remote work patterns also shifted. The percentage of marketers working remotely all the time fell to 37.8% from 48.7% in Fall 2022, according to the Duke CMO Survey’s 2024 reporting. For personal-brand operators, this change is a reminder that marketing work can be distributed across locations even as the share of fully remote work changes.
Privacy and brand trust
Trust-related practices were measured directly in the Duke CMO Survey in 2024. Sixty percent of marketers promised not to sell customers’ personal information. Fifty-seven percent asked for consumer consent to use personal information, and 57% invested to increase trust in brand reputation.
These percentages cover related but distinct actions. A promise not to sell data is not the same as asking for consent, and either practice is different from investing in reputation. Together, they show that privacy and trust were being handled through multiple commitments rather than one universal measure.
For a personal brand, the distinction matters because credibility is built through repeated behavior: how information is collected, how expectations are explained, and how a reputation investment is reflected in the customer experience. The available figures quantify reported practices, but they do not measure whether every promise was fulfilled or how consumers responded.
Community, social commerce, and creators
HubSpot’s State of Social Media research for 2024 highlighted the role of community. Eighty-six percent of social media marketers said building an active online community was critical to success in 2024. That finding places audience participation alongside publishing and promotion as a central social-media objective.
Social buying was also expected to grow. Eighty-four percent of social media marketers predicted that consumers would buy directly in social apps more often than on brand or third-party sites in 2024. This is a prediction about behavior, not a measured share of completed purchases.
Creators were expected to become more visible in brand identity. Eighty-four percent predicted that most companies would have a creator or influencer as the face of their brand in 2024. For professionals building a personal brand, that forecast points to a closer connection between individual expertise, audience trust, and commercial storytelling.
The statistics across these studies describe a marketing environment where technology spending is rising, utilization remains uneven, and AI adoption is moving from experiments toward more regular assistance. At the same time, personalization barriers, incomplete data access, privacy commitments, community building, and creator-led visibility remain human and organizational challenges. The measurement periods and research sources differ, so each figure is most useful as context for a specific decision rather than as a single universal benchmark.