The One Question That Reveals Whether Your Team's AI Use Is Actually Changing Decisions
Scott Schnaars
83% of Demand Gen Marketers Use AI Daily. Why Aren't Results Matching?
Eighty-three percent of demand gen marketers use AI as a core part of their daily workflow. That number came from a recent Exit Five poll (https://www.exitfive.com/community). The next question, which the poll did not ask, is the more important one: are results getting better?
High AI adoption does not automatically translate to better outcomes. There is a significant difference between AI for productivity (drafting copy, summarizing calls) and AI for strategy (optimizing campaigns, identifying anomalies, recommending budget shifts). Most daily AI use is concentrated in the first category. Most of the business value lives in the second.
For CMOs, this distinction matters because the narrative around AI adoption often conflates usage with impact. Adoption metrics tell you how often people are touching the tool. They do not tell you whether the tool is changing the decisions that affect pipeline.
What the gap between AI adoption and AI impact looks like:
- Teams using AI to write ad copy faster while targeting and budget decisions are still made manually without AI support
- AI summarizing performance reports while not flagging the anomalies that should change what the team does next
- High perceived productivity from AI assistants with no measurable change in pipeline outcomes over the period of adoption
- AI tools deployed across the team with no defined use case for how they should change the decisions that matter most
The CMOs who will see AI impact in their programs are deploying it specifically for the decisions currently made on incomplete information, and building the data connections that make AI recommendations reliable.
Yirla applies AI specifically to paid campaign optimization, connected to your actual pipeline data rather than generic benchmarks. (https://www.yirla.com/en/platform)
