Adobe report: 96% of marketers use AI, just 44% call their data AI-ready

August 24, 2026 · Digiday

A 2026 Adobe AI and Digital Trends Report puts a number on the gap between AI ambition and AI readiness. Ninety-six percent of marketers say they already use AI in their roles, and 44% call their organization's data quality and accessibility adequate for it. Digiday's sponsored analysis pairs that finding with two more data points. Gartner research shows 67% of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free buying experience, shifting more of the buying journey into digital channels marketing has to track. A 2026 Demand Gen Report found 44% of marketers say first-party data improves their customer insight, and 18% name incomplete data as their biggest barrier to confident decisions. Buyer signals, intent data, campaign engagement and sales activity, are collected in growing volume and stored across disconnected systems, so no single team sees the complete buying journey.

Campaigns and sales outreach built on a partial data picture arrive late or target the wrong stage of the buying journey, since marketing often optimizes one channel while sales pulls from a separate information source. Digiday's piece frames the fix as account orchestration: connecting people, signals and channels so a team can act while a buying group's interest is still building. Media buyers and planners running account-based or B2B campaigns face the same coordination problem across their own martech and adtech stacks. Data quality and platform fragmentation determine whether a first-party dataset produces a usable customer view.