Marketing has become the biggest spender on artificial intelligence inside large companies, yet the payoff in profit remains thin for most, according to McKinsey State of AI research. Marketing budgets for AI rose 64 percent year over year, the fastest growth of any business function, with sales close behind at 61 percent.

The spending reflects broad deployment. Marketing and sales overtook supply chain as the top function for AI use, a first since the survey began in 2018, and about 88 percent of organizations now report using AI in at least one function. Adoption at that level has become the baseline rather than a differentiator.

Results tell a more cautious story. Fewer than 6 percent of survey respondents attributed significant enterprise-level EBIT impact to their AI use, and only about 39 percent reported any measurable profit effect at all. The 49-percentage-point spread between organizations that use AI and those that see profit from it stands as the defining figure of the 2026 data.

The gap points to an execution problem rather than an access problem. Companies capturing value tend to redesign core processes around AI instead of layering tools onto existing workflows, and they concentrate effort on a small number of high-value use cases. For marketing teams, that suggests the budget increases now flowing into AI will separate winners from the field based on how the tools are integrated, not simply whether they are adopted.

Source: McKinsey - https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights