In partnership with
How Marketers Are Scaling With AI in 2026
61% of marketers say this is the biggest marketing shift in decades.
Get the data and trends shaping growth in 2026 with this groundbreaking state of marketing report.
Inside you’ll discover:
Results from over 1,500 marketers centered around results, goals and priorities in the age of AI
Stand out content and growth trends in a world full of noise
How to scale with AI without losing humanity
Where to invest for the best return in 2026
Download your 2026 state of marketing report today.
📰The AI Briefing
This week’s brief is that AI has stopped being a tool marketers pick up for specific jobs. It's become infrastructure. Using AI isn't the edge anymore. Using it with judgement is.
Claude Opus 4.7 launched. Runs multi-hour projects unsupervised. Pushes back when your brief is flawed instead of quietly executing it. The interesting part isn't that it's faster. It's that it tells you when your brief is wrong.
Canva AI 2.0 landed for 260M users. Describe a multi-channel campaign in one sentence. It generates every asset, pulls context from your Slack and Gmail. Production used to favour bigger teams. Not anymore.
Open AI is pivoting hard to enterprise. A new model for "high-value professional work" is imminent. Projecting $100B annual revenue by 2030. The OpenAI vs Anthropic fight is about to pull capability into your stack faster than your roadmap can handle.t.
87% of marketing teams now use AI. Autonomous agent deployment more than doubled in a single quarter. Meta, TikTok and Google have quietly downranked obvious AI-generated creative in 2026 algorithm updates.
Sources: Claude Opus 4.7 release · Canva AI 2.0 launch · OpenAI enterprise pivot · AI marketing adoption data
✍Andy’s Take
The Delegation Trap: Why Handing Everything to AI Is the Wrong Move
AI can now run campaigns, generate assets, and target audiences without you. The marketers who let it will lose.
Something has shifted in the feed this month.
Six months ago, the dominant register around AI was anxiety. Too many tools. Not enough clarity. A vague sense of falling behind the conversation. Now the tone has changed. Scroll LinkedIn for ten minutes and you can feel it. The mood is closer to relief. Specifically, the relief of people who believe they've just been told they can stop doing the hard part.
Claude Opus 4.7 runs multi-hour projects unsupervised.
Canva AI 2.0 generates a multi-channel campaign from one sentence.
Meta is building toward an ad system where you hand over a URL and a budget and walk away.
The message from every platform this quarter is the same. You don't need to do this any more. We'll handle it.
Taken at face value, I think that message is one of the most dangerous things a marketer can internalise right now.
The Pitch Is "Stop Thinking." Don't Take It.
Let me be clear about what I'm not saying.
I'm not saying these tools aren't impressive. They are. Opus 4.7 genuinely changes what's delegable. I've been testing it on research tasks that used to eat half a day, and the outputs are materially better than what I was getting three months ago. Canva's agentic builder is remarkable leverage for small teams. Meta's automation direction is, frankly, inevitable.
What I am saying is that the narrative has quietly shifted. Six months ago it was "AI helps you do better work." Now it's "AI does the work so you don't have to."
Those are fundamentally different propositions.
When Mark Zuckerberg says the end state is that businesses "don't need any creative, you don't need any targeting demographic, you don't need any measurement," he's describing a world where the platform makes every meaningful decision. Your role, in that world, is to supply a URL and a credit card.
That isn't empowerment.
That's dependency.
And the marketers cheering loudest for it are the ones most at risk.
Automation Without Judgement Is Just Expensive Randomness
Here's the bit that keeps getting lost in the enthusiasm.
AI systems optimise for the objectives you give them. If your objectives are shallow, your results will be shallow. If your positioning is fuzzy, your AI-generated campaigns will be fuzzy at scale. If you don't know what good looks like, you can't evaluate what the system produces.
The 87% adoption figure from Salesforce's State of Marketing 2026 report tells us something important, but probably not what most people think. It doesn't tell us marketing teams are getting better. It tells us AI is now so embedded that the tool itself has stopped being the differentiator.
Everyone has it. The question is what you're pointing it at.
And the data on the other side is telling. Meta, TikTok, and Google have all quietly started downranking obvious AI-generated creative in their 2026 algorithm updates. The platforms selling you automation are simultaneously penalising you for using it without taste.
That tension is not a bug. It's a signal.
The volume play, more content, more variants, more campaigns, faster, is already losing.
Not because AI-generated content is bad. Because AI-generated content without strategic intent is indistinguishable from noise.
And there is a lot of noise right now.
