Douglas Nicol of ACAM explains why AI activity alone isn’t translating into commercial results for most Australian marketing teams.
Australian marketing teams have embraced AI in a hurry. Working out what to actually do with it is proving slower.
That’s the core finding of ACAM’s 2026 Australian AI in Marketing Benchmark Report, built from responses from 126 CMOs and senior marketing leaders across 12 industries. The report found AI has moved from curiosity to daily marketing reality, but AI roadmaps remain underdeveloped, workflow redesign is immature and ROI proof is inconsistent, which is holding back scale.
Where marketers actually sit
To measure that gap properly, ACAM built Australia’s first structured AI maturity framework, a six-level scale assessed across seven drivers including leadership and culture, governance, data readiness and workflow design. The results show most teams clustered in the middle of the pack. 31.7% of respondents sit at level two, “Established Beginners”, where AI is recognised but used inconsistently. Half of all respondents, 50%, are at level three, “Early Emerging”, where adoption is spreading but maturity remains uneven. Just 16.7% have reached level four, “Mature Emerging”, where governance and measurement are starting to align.
Nobody surveyed has reached the top two levels, “Early Advanced” or “Leading Advanced”, where AI becomes fully embedded in how marketing work gets planned and scaled.
Douglas Nicol, co-founder of ACAM, said the conversation has shifted over the past year. “Twelve months ago, much of the conversation was about experimentation and early adoption,” he said. “In 2026, the question has changed. It is no longer what AI tools marketing teams are using, it is whether they are building the maturity to turn AI activity into serious commercial impact.” He added that while confidence and use cases are both growing, “roadmaps remain weak, workflow redesign is immature and ROI proof is inconsistent. The momentum is real, but it’s uneven.”
The report’s most telling number may be this one: just 6% of organisations have a fully documented AI roadmap. Almost six in ten, 58%, have no documented roadmap at all, meaning most AI investment is happening without a clear plan behind it.
That gap extends to the tools themselves. Enterprise AI platforms, often selected at the C-suite level, are becoming what the report describes as an arranged marriage for marketing teams, present, but not necessarily aligned with how teams actually work. 45% of organisations said their AI platforms have been disappointing, harder than expected, or only okay, against 55% who said their platforms delivered better than expected or overdelivered.
A widening confidence split
Beneath the overall optimism, CMOs are managing a real divide within their teams. 69% said the dominant sentiment toward AI was “excited but cautious,” but 56% also reported a concerned minority who were cautious, scared or negative. The proportion of team members in the “scared” category has grown by 22 points since 2025.
Karin Du Chenne, group executive director at Kantar, said the priority now is clarity rather than more enthusiasm. “Organisations don’t need more AI hype,” she said. “They need clarity on where they are today, where the opportunities lie and what to do next.” IBM ANZ chief marketing officer Miki Luong pointed to a similar shift in focus, noting that marketers must now ask “broader questions around how their teams operate, how decisions get made, how data flows through the organisation and how customer engagement is orchestrated.”
AI slop, the top fear
The single biggest operational concern cited by CMOs, at 61%, is AI slop, low-quality, generic content produced at speed. A further 32% named brand damage as a concern, reflecting worry that faster AI-driven production is making brands harder to tell apart.
Nicol said the next phase of growth in the sector will hinge less on tool adoption and more on discipline. “The next phase of AI growth will not be defined by more tools, but capability, discipline and confidence,” he said, adding that competitive advantage will come from “stronger human and AI collaboration, and more distinctive marketing.”
Natalie Lockwood, chief marketing officer at NAB, described the shift from 2025 as encouraging but incomplete. “The progression from 2025 to 2026 shows an industry moving forward at pace with AI,” she said. “But it is also a reality check. We are not yet at scale. The next challenge for CMOs is turning rising confidence and activity into capability, workflows, clearer roadmaps, governance and measurable commercial impact.”
The bulk of respondents to this year’s benchmark came from larger organisations, with 38% from businesses of 1,001 or more employees and 29% from those with 101 to 1,000 staff. A third of respondents, 33%, came from organisations under 100 employees, though the report doesn’t break out how that group’s maturity levels differed from the rest.
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