Opinion

Kantar: 75% of marketers plan to pour more into AI assistants in 2027 — only 23% of consumers trust them

Kantar's Media Reactions 2026 study, drawn from 800 senior marketers and 23,000 consumers, documents a widening gap between AI ad spend and consumer willingness to act on AI recommendations.

By Aaron Gerstle· Opinion & analysis·2026-10-10·3 min read

Photo: Unsplash / Carlos Muza — Laptop screen showing marketing analytics charts and performance data

A net 75% of senior marketers plan to increase investment in AI assistants in 2027, according to Kantar’s Media Reactions 2026 study released October 2, even though only 23% of consumers say they trust AI assistant recommendations and only 32% currently use them to research brands and products. The study pulls from 800+ senior marketers and 23,000 consumers, and 62% of those marketers expect generative AI to play a pivotal role in brand recommendations.

That’s a familiar shape. Spend chases a channel the audience hasn’t yet decided to believe in.

Gonca Bubani, Kantar’s global director of media, puts it plainly: “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.”

The confidence data underneath is the real story. Marketers reporting the right balance between brand-building and performance fell from 60% to 50% year over year. Confidence in the overall media mix slid from 64% to 57%. Only 51% feel they’re extracting actionable intelligence from their data. Meanwhile Kantar’s LIFT+ work shows 43% of campaign performance from 2020–2025 came from channels working together, up from 18% pre-2014. Cross-channel coordination is doing more work precisely as marketer certainty erodes.

Kantar CEO Paul Zwillenberg frames it this way: “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.” He adds: “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.”

For a 5-to-30-person company, the implication is sharper than it’s for a CMO with a hedging budget. Chasing first-party audience targeting inside ChatGPT ads or PostcardMania’s bolt-on answer-engine optimization for small-business campaigns can wait until trust catches up. Proven channels can’t.

LemonLime is one option on the proven-channel side: a done-for-you service that prepares finished outreach and branded content for email, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, X, and TikTok, with the owner approving every send.

The 2027 budgets are being written now against a 23% trust number. That gap has to close in one direction or the other.

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