Seventy-four percent of IAB UK members surveyed for the body’s State of AI in Advertising report (published yesterday) said they were already experimenting with agentic AI. Meanwhile 73% of the 200 advertisers who were surveyed said they’re optimistic that AI will transform advertising for the better. And nearly two-thirds expect AI to drive accelerating or transformative change in creative development over the next 12 months.
On the surface, it reads like an industry racing towards an AI-powered future. But beneath the headline numbers, it’s more complicated.
For all the excitement around autonomous agents, AI-powered media buying and agentic commerce, adoption remains relatively limited. Just 4% of IAB UK members describe themselves as ‘agent-first’, with marketing operations built around AI agents. Most remain in the experimentation or pilot stage. As the report itself notes, agentic AI is currently ‘more as a future direction than a current reality’.
That gap between rhetoric and reality runs throughout the report. Only 20% of industry members believe agentic AI will play a major role in how media is bought and sold over the next year. Just 23% expect agentic commerce to gain significant momentum in the next 12 months. Much of the value generated by AI so far comes not from revolutionary new capabilities but from making existing processes faster and cheaper. The report concludes that the gains remain ‘largely operational, enhancing how work is done rather than fundamentally changing where value is created’.
Consumers, meanwhile, appear considerably less enthusiastic than the industry itself. Just 36% agree that AI will improve advertising, compared with 73% of advertisers. More revealingly, 73% of consumers say they would never trust an AI assistant enough to make significant purchase decisions on their behalf.
If there is one area where the report offers more certainty, it is in identifying the likely winners. Both advertisers and IAB UK members overwhelmingly expect platforms and ad tech companies to benefit most from AI adoption. Given the rise of AI-powered search, AI-generated recommendations and platform-owned creative tools, that seems a reasonable conclusion.
The advertising industry may still be figuring out exactly what an AI future looks like. But as discovery, search and advertising become increasingly mediated by AI systems, the unanimous verdict is that even more power is likely to flow to the platforms that control them.