New research from TripleLift, the Creative SSP powered by TL Spark, has surfaced a significant disconnect at the heart of AI adoption in the advertising industry. While 60% of advertising professionals report that their companies have a centralized AI strategy, fewer than 30% express high confidence in that approach. The findings, drawn from 200 global advertising professionals, point to an industry-wide standoff where organizations are eager to unlock greater efficiency and performance from AI, but remain hesitant to relinquish control over creative quality, brand safety, and campaign execution.
Quick Intel
An Industry-Wide AI Standoff Takes Shape
The advertising industry's relationship with AI is characterized less by resistance than by unresolved tension. Organizations are actively investing in AI strategies and deploying the technology across key functions, yet the confidence gap between having a strategy and trusting it remains wide. This dynamic reflects a broader pattern across enterprise AI adoption, where the theoretical promise of automation is tempered by practical concerns around reliability, control, and accountability.
"Machine learning has been a staple in the ad space for over a decade, with agentic AI and LLMs fundamentally up-leveling how campaigns are built and optimized," said Rob Deichert, COO at TripleLift. "Now, the human layer is getting tools that can handle tasks ML isn't ideal for. This leaves the industry caught in a balancing act. Companies want better results from AI, yet remain hesitant to share the data and trust required to unlock its full potential."
The research, published in TripleLift's industry report "The Evolution of AI in Global Advertising," examines how advertisers are integrating AI across media, measurement, audience targeting, and creative workflows, and where human oversight continues to play a critical role.
AI Excels in Data-Driven Tasks, But Creative Remains Human Territory
The report identifies a clear divide in how AI is being applied across the four pillars of campaign execution. In data-heavy functions, AI adoption is well established. For creative work, it remains largely peripheral.
Seventy-three percent of respondents use AI for campaign optimization, covering bidding, audience, and creative adjustments, while 59% apply it to audience targeting including segmentation and contextual modeling. Creative production tells a different story, with just 25% of respondents using AI in this area, and most of those limiting its role to testing and iteration rather than fully AI-generated assets.
This divide reflects the industry's underlying concern that AI, while effective at processing and optimizing at scale, has not yet demonstrated the judgment and nuance required for brand-level creative decisions. Creative execution and supply-side choices continue to require human oversight due to concerns around quality, brand safety, and accuracy.
Full Autonomy Remains Out of Reach
Despite the volume of AI activity across campaign functions, fully autonomous campaign execution is still rare. Only 19% of respondents report using AI to completely automate the end-to-end campaign process, while 40% say they maintain manual control over the entire workflow. The gap between these two positions reflects the industry's cautious, incremental approach to expanding AI's operational footprint.
"When AI systems work in sync across media, measurement, and audience, the opportunity is clear: faster, always-on campaign execution," added Deichert. "The missing piece is creative. Bridging that gap, without losing the human spark, is what will define the next era of advertising."
The Review Tax Is Quietly Eroding Efficiency Gains
One of the more striking findings in the report is the degree to which human review is consuming the time savings that AI is supposed to generate. With 74% of respondents reporting that they spend several hours a week validating AI-generated work, a meaningful share of AI's productivity benefit is being redirected into oversight rather than output.
This review tax is a direct consequence of the trust gap identified elsewhere in the research. When confidence in AI outputs is low, validation becomes a non-negotiable step rather than an occasional check, effectively creating a parallel manual workload alongside the automated one. Concerns driving this behavior include technical inaccuracies, brand safety risks, and inconsistent creative quality across AI-generated assets.
Bridging Automation and Trust Through Coordinated Intelligence
TripleLift's research frames the path forward not as a choice between AI and human oversight, but as a design challenge: building systems that integrate AI effectively across all campaign pillars while preserving the transparency and control that advertisers require. The company's own TL Spark intelligence layer is positioned as a direct response to this challenge, designed to unify fragmented campaign workflows, apply AI more effectively across decision-making processes, and maintain visibility throughout.
The broader implication for the industry is that trust in AI will not be established through capability alone. It will require infrastructure that makes AI's reasoning transparent, its outputs auditable, and its integration with human judgment deliberate rather than incidental.
The advertising industry's AI standoff is not a story of rejection but of incomplete trust. The data from TripleLift's research makes clear that organizations have moved well past skepticism about AI's potential and are now grappling with the harder question of how to operationalize it at the level of reliability and control that brand-level decisions demand. Closing the gap between AI strategy and AI confidence will define competitive positioning in the next phase of advertising, and the organizations that resolve it earliest stand to gain the most from the efficiency and performance advantages that coordinated AI-driven campaign execution can deliver.
About TripleLift
TripleLift is the Creative SSP powered by TL Spark, our agentic intelligence layer. We orchestrate creative, supply, audience, and measurement into a single outcome-driven system across the open internet, retail media, and CTV. Our platform enables brands to drive measurable performance while helping publishers maximize yield and preserve high-quality user experiences.
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