The Missing Middle

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I.

Last year, my friend Jeremy Korst co-authored a great piece for Harvard Business Review that opened with a bold prediction, “among all the managerial functions, marketing is likely to be the one that’s most disrupted by generative AI.” AI’s immediate influence on marketing has emerged like nothing we’ve seen before. In the most recent release of The CMO Survey—a joint project of the American Marketing Association, Deloitte, and Duke University—senior marketers said they were using AI to automate and optimize marketing about 24% of the time, a 40% increase from the 2025 study. The same audience forecast that they will be using the technology for this purpose 56% of the time in 3 years—representing a 131% increase in AI’s power over marketing.

Community on The Findings Report

The Missing Middle

I.