Screendragon’s survey of 500 U.S. and U.K. marketing leaders suggests AI adoption is widespread, but fragmented workflows are limiting its ability to deliver value at scale.
Screendragon’s latest research suggests marketing teams have largely moved beyond the question of whether to use artificial intelligence, only to encounter a more complicated challenge: fitting it into the way work actually gets done. Based on responses from 500 marketing, creative, content and operations leaders in the United States and United Kingdom, the study found that just 24% of organizations have fully integrated AI into everyday workflows.
That gap matters because adding AI tools does not necessarily simplify an already complicated operating environment. According to the research, only 18% of work enters organizations through structured workflow systems, while fewer than 20% of respondents have real-time visibility into how people, time and budgets are allocated. When AI operates separately from these processes, it can create additional handoffs rather than eliminating existing ones.
Other findings point to a broader problem with the infrastructure surrounding creative and content production. Some 82% of organizations lack fully connected digital asset management and workflow environments, while 38% still depend on manual or time-consuming reporting. At the same time, only 21% of respondents said they were very confident in their ability to meet future content demand, highlighting the pressure teams face as expectations for output increase.
The findings complicate a common assumption that greater access to increasingly capable AI systems will automatically translate into greater organizational productivity. Screendragon’s research instead suggests that the next gains may depend on connecting AI with the systems through which projects are requested, created, reviewed, approved and measured. That requires attention not only to technology but also to data, governance and the structure of everyday work.
The report, which updates a benchmark Screendragon conducted in 2023, covers respondents from brands, in-house agencies and independent agencies across industries including financial services, retail, healthcare, technology and consumer packaged goods. Its central implication is that marketing’s AI challenge is shifting from experimentation toward integration: organizations may already have powerful tools, but extracting sustained value from them depends on whether the underlying workflows are organized well enough to support them.
