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Kantar has found that 75% of marketers plan to increase investment in AI assistants, including in advertising and brand visibility, while only 23% of consumers trust AI assistant recommendations.
The findings point to a widening gap between how quickly brands are shifting budgets towards AI-driven discovery tools and how willing consumers are to rely on them when researching products.
Kantar's Media Reactions study, based on interviews with more than 800 senior marketers and about 23,000 consumers, found that 62% of marketers expect generative AI to play a pivotal role in brand recommendations. Yet only 32% of consumers currently use AI assistants to research brands and products.
The figures suggest marketers see AI assistants as an emerging way to influence purchase decisions, while consumers remain more cautious about trusting answers generated by those systems.
"There's a lot of money moving towards AI on the assumption people will use it the way the industry expects. The reality is that marketers don't yet have a firm grasp of the nuanced feelings people have about AI environments or how they work within their wider media mix. That shouldn't stop them from experimenting with AI, but it does mean they need to carefully test, measure and learn as they invest," said Gonca Bubani, Global Director, Media at Kantar.
Confidence falls
The study also found that marketers are becoming less certain about their broader media choices as the number of channels expands and data volumes grow.
Only half of advertisers said they were confident they had the right balance between brand-building and performance marketing, down from 60% a year earlier. Some 57% said their organisation had the right media mix, compared with 64% previously, while 51% said they were drawing useful intelligence from their data to support marketing goals.
That loss of confidence comes as brands spread spending across a wider range of formats, including AI tools, creator content, commerce media and streaming platforms. The results suggest many marketing teams are struggling not just to decide where to spend, but also how to measure results across fragmented channels.
Bubani said the uncertainty may be greater than the evidence suggests. "Despite their insecurity, marketers are actually getting better at making fragmented channels perform in their favour. Kantar LIFT+ data shows that between 2020 and 2025, 43% of campaign performance came from channels working together, compared with only 18% pre-2014."
"Marketing has never been harder to navigate, right when businesses need every dollar of investment to work harder. AI now shapes how people discover and choose brands, so strong brands have to earn the right to be recommended - by people, and by the machines guiding them. CMOs are investing more in the future, yet growing less certain about the decisions in front of them today. The answer is better intelligence, not more data," Paul Zwillenberg, Chief Executive Officer at Kantar, said.
Platform rankings
Kantar also published new rankings on advertising equity across media brands. Among marketers, YouTube ranked first, followed by Instagram, with Google tied for third. Among consumers, Google ranked first, followed by Amazon, YouTube and Instagram, with Netflix in fifth place.
The consumer ranking uses a new measure that combines attitudes to advertising on a platform with exposure to it. The aim is to show where audiences are both likely to encounter advertising and more open to receiving it.
The comparison highlights a gap between marketer preferences and consumer responses. While marketers continue to favour a relatively small group of digital platforms, the consumer list suggests ad receptiveness does not align exactly with industry trust scores.
Bubani said: "Marketer trust is only one side of the picture. Effective media planning also depends on understanding where consumers are receptive to ads. Comparing those perspectives can reveal if marketers are putting too much stock in their own views, or if they are adequately reflecting consumer demand. This is particularly relevant as investment shifts into AI, creators, commerce media and streaming."
Creator shift
Outside AI, the research found continued momentum behind creator content, with spending plans shifting towards smaller creators rather than celebrity names. Some 66% of marketers said they plan to invest in micro-creators and 61% in nano-creators, ahead of macro-influencers at 48% and mega-influencers at 42%.
That pattern suggests brands are looking for narrower but potentially more engaged audiences rather than relying mainly on scale. Previous Kantar research found that engagement levels and brand-building impact align only about a third of the time when creators are used, raising questions about using follower numbers or engagement metrics as the main basis for selection.
"Two thirds of marketers plan to increase their investment in creator content, where success is now less about reach and more about relevance: who opens up the best access to audiences, in a credible context and through stronger creative collaboration. We've shown that follower count doesn't guarantee effective reach: more important is how creators help brands communicate their meaningful difference to their audience," said Bubani.