Artificial intelligence has officially left the lab. In 2026, it doesn’t just help marketers make decisions — it increasingly makes them, executing campaigns, shaping discovery, optimizing creative, and recalibrating measurement in real time. What began as a set of productivity tools has matured into an operating layer that sits across the entire marketing system—connecting creative, media, commerce, identity, and analytics into a single, continuously learning engine.

That shift is the story of Advertising Week’s State of Artificial Intelligence Report for 2026. Across the year ahead, we’ll see agentic AI take on the mechanics of media buying, while humans move up the stack into strategy, governance, and accountability. Search will evolve from a list of links to an “answer layer” that rewrites how brands are discovered and trusted. Creative effectiveness will become the most decisive ROI lever — measurable, comparable, and scalable—while retail media networks accelerate into closed-loop growth machines powered by predictive commerce. At the same time, privacy-first data strategies, synthetic data, and provenance standards will redefine what “signal” and “trust” mean in a world flooded with AI generated content.

The implication is clear: 2026 won’t reward the brands that simply adopt AI. It will reward the brands that operationalize it responsibly — building systems that learn faster, measure more honestly, protect consumer trust, and keep human creativity and judgment at the center.

This report is a guide to that new reality: the forces reshaping marketing, the capabilities separating leaders from laggards, and the decisions executives must make now to compete in the first truly AI-native year.