Marketers Poured $47 Billion Into AI — and Consumers Are Pulling Back

A while ago, I came across a set of numbers and stopped for a beat.

In 2025, the money spent worldwide on AI in marketing came to about USD 47 billion. By 2028, that figure is projected to top USD 107 billion.

47 billion. More than doubling in two years.

My first thought was: with that much money pouring in, how good are the results, really? Are consumers buying in?

So I dug through the data — and found a contradiction that's genuinely fascinating.

Marketers Are Moving Faster Than Anyone

Let's start with one fact: marketers have embraced AI at an astonishing pace.

A 2025 global survey asked marketing professionals, "To what extent have you worked AI into your data-driven marketing?" The result? Those who said they don't use AI at all and have no plans to — just over one in ten.

In other words, nearly nine in ten marketing teams are either already using it or evaluating how to put it to work.

What are they using it for?

At the top of the list: targeted ad delivery and data analysis, with personalized recommendations right behind.

Put plainly, they're letting machines handle the work that's slow and tedious for humans. Email scheduling, A/B testing, social media distribution — tasks that used to take a specialist half a day of fiddling are now finished with a single pass of the tools.

Marketers get freed up to think about strategy.

On the enterprise side, generative AI (GenAI) is also moving fast. A 2024 survey showed that 30% of organizations had already deployed an initial generative AI solution, and another 27% were evaluating the results.

Nearly six in ten companies have either made their move or have one foot in the door.

But on the Consumer Side, the Winds Are Shifting

This is the part I find most interesting.

Brands are sprinting. Consumers? They're actually stepping back.

In 2023, 57% of consumers said they were comfortable with brands using AI. By 2024, that figure had fallen to 46%.

Eleven percentage points gone in a single year.

What signal does that send?

It's not that consumers dislike AI itself. Young people are precisely the most active users of AI applications — the 18-to-24 cohort accounts for nearly half of every kind of AI app out there. But when it comes to "brands using AI to do things to me," they're growing wary.

Wary of what, exactly?

Another 2024 survey drilled down. More than half of respondents said they were uncomfortable with brands using AI to generate virtual spokespersons in place of real celebrities. Nearly half said they disliked seeing AI-edited product images and AI-generated product photos.

In one sentence: consumers' worry boils down to — "the stuff you make with AI, I'm afraid I'm being played."

Once the thread of trust between brand and consumer is seen as "a machine operating in the middle," it starts to fray.

The Money's Spent — But the Road Is Rough

So is everything smooth sailing on the marketers' side?

Not quite.

A late-2024 survey asked marketers, "What's the biggest obstacle when you put AI to work?" Number one was reliability. The outputs AI produces aren't stable enough to use straight away. Number two was skill gaps on the team — not knowing how to get the best out of the tools. Number three was security risks.

Money spent. Tools bought. But actually putting them to real use — that's anything but simple.

That's the situation the marketing industry faces right now.

Brands are accelerating their investment, and budgets are shifting toward AI. 47 billion — and likely more next year. Yet consumers are withdrawing trust, and marketing teams are still wrestling with the reliability of the tools.

So What Should You Do?

I think there's a lesson hidden in the data.

The first mistake a lot of brands make is treating AI only as an efficiency tool — and forgetting it's also a decision consumers have to be OK with.

You think generating a product image with AI is faster and cheaper — great. But when the consumer sees that image, what crosses their mind is, "Is this real?" They don't know whether you just touched up the colors or fabricated the whole thing.

Trust is more expensive than efficiency.

The money you save may cost you several times that amount in consumer trust to win back.

So if you're in marketing, my advice is simple. Internally: go ahead and use AI to boost efficiency — automate what should be automated, analyze what should be analyzed. But externally, on the touchpoints consumers actually see — your product images, your spokesperson, your customer service conversations — slow down. Think a little more about how consumers feel when they notice AI stepping in.

The scale of USD 47 billion tells us there's no longer a question of "whether to use AI" in marketing. The real question is: how do we use it in a way that doesn't make consumers afraid?

That contradiction isn't going away anytime soon.

Whoever figures this out first is the one who pulls ahead.