With the rise of AI, specifically agentic AI, 90 percent of chief marketing officers (CMOs) believe that strong brand preference is vital.
Dentsu Creative, the holding company’s creative agency, released this information in its annual Dentsu Creative CMO Report 2025 titled Agents of Reinvention. The report collects responses from industry professionals and showcases how marketers are approaching creative content production, with this years’ report zeroing in on the domination of AI.
Worldwide, 89 percent of CMOs agree that agentic AI will have a major impact on their businesses. The same percentage emphasises that trust and taste are also increasingly important with the rise of this technology.
Trust delegates the relationships between brands and customers, yet it remains a challenge for marketers. More than half of marketers in the report referenced “building trust with consumers in an era of misinformation” as one of the largest issues impacting business goals.
The report highlighted that, as more people use AI agents for tasks such as booking travel or finding restaurants to try, there is a need to trust the agents understand tastes and preferences. With this, AI transparency–such as what information the models are trained on–will also be necessary.
Additionally, most CMOs – 86 percent – agree that talking with customers is more important with the rise of AI, the Dentsu report revealed.
This figure rises to 92 percent in the APAC region.
Over 30 percent use AI daily, with nearly all CMOs now using AI for work–such as for summarising research and drafting copy.
Preserving Human Creativity
However, as AI becomes more advanced, CMOs question if relying on the technology is in the best interest of brand-customer interactions. In a 13 percentage point increase from the 2024 report’s results, 78 percent of CMOs believe that GenAI “will never replace the human imagination.” In the same vein, 68 percent believe AI “will never be able to create content that moves people,”–a 19 percentage point increase from last year.
The report points to the “uncanny valley” qualities of AI-generated content–an uneasy, negative emotional response to content detected as AI-generated. It is the distaste for non-human produced content that leads today’s CMOs (81 percent) to believe that customers will lean toward, and specifically pay more for, human-created products.
Aside from content creation, many marketing professionals see great value in deploying AI for internal tasks. Of the report’s contributors, most agreed that AI will improve the “ability to produce assets cheaply and quickly (89 percent), make it easier to in-house marketing (90 percent), and open up the ability to use their agency for ideation (91 percent).
Among this adoption, 73 percent still worry that using AI risks reducing the impact of a brand.
AI Influencer Marketing
Dentsu’s report pointed to the surge in influencer marketing, as 90 percent of CMOs believe that “social and influencer content generates more engagement than traditional advertising.” Most (88 percent) CMOs are using influencers to boost visibility within AI search–at a time where most CMOs (89 percent) also believe that AI “will transform the future of search.”
Marketing professionals in the UK were shown to be “significantly less likely than their global peers to be using influencers in this way.” However, around 75 percent of UK CMOs still integrate influencers into their marketing strategy.
Using Quality Data
The report also showed that CMOs (54 percent) are increasingly using AI to predict customer behaviours. The report’s contributors indicated that, while AI can help expedite marketing processes, relying on quality data for customer behaviour predictions presents challenges. The CMOs referenced “obtaining the right data” – such as market intelligence – “to make timely and appropriate decisions” as “the most significant external challenge” they expect to face in the next six months-to-a-year.
“The future of marketing is about augmenting human ingenuity with AI to enable a level of pace and personalisation not previously possible.” said Abbey Klaassen, global brand president, Dentsu Creative.
“It’s not about doing more with less, it’s about doing things we couldn’t do before: connecting creativity, media, data and production to meet the right customer with the right message in the right moment, leveraging the modern content supply chain to show up in more of those moments than possible in the past.”
