From AI Ambitions to Execution: Why Your Marketing Team Keeps Falling Short

The Gist

Mandates fall short. Top-down orders to use AI rarely lead to full implementation.
Agile teams advance. Marketers working in agile environments integrate AI more effectively.
Training needs application. Formal learning must be paired with hands-on experience to stick.

Senior leaders focusing on marketing technology know that AI adoption is crucial to remain competitive. However, getting their teams ready to make such a major shift, let alone overcome any internal opposition, presents huge challenges.

Huge or not, these challenges must be overcome. The latest State of Agile Marketing (SOAM) Report from AgileSherpas found that integrating AI strongly correlated with overall organizational success in 2025. The benefits AI brings in terms of process efficiency and enhanced capabilities are quickly shifting from “nice to haves” into essentials.

ai adoption across levels of marketing success graph

What can leaders do to make AI adoption happen? There are several data-backed insights to guide us.

Why Most AI Implementation Fails
The Teams Getting AI Right
What Sets Agile Marketers Apart
How Senior Leaders Can Support AI Implementation

Why Most AI Implementation Fails

The first step to overcoming resistance to AI is truly understanding what the implementation process looks like in practice. Often, senior leaders will simply tell teams to begin using AI to improve their processes. As soon as some tools have been integrated into their ways of working, this mandate can be called complete.

There are two issues with this understanding. The first is that a simple mandate from above is unlikely to achieve real AI implementation success. You may simply end up with marketers who use ChatGPT here and there, rather than having a more complete integration of AI tools into key processes. A mandate is also more likely to generate backlash, as marketers may feel that AI threatens their jobs or that they don’t have the resources for proper AI integration.

The second issue is that AI implementation is never fully complete. In 2025 alone, an average of more than six new AI marketing tools are being released a day. Staying on top of that pace of change requires continuously testing, experimenting and iterating on how your teams use AI.

Ideally, AI implementation will involve precisely that kind of testing and iterating. Teams should have clear goals for their AI use, and these goals should be preferably tied to broader KPIs. This allows AI integration to be focused and makes it easier to quantify its impact. Teams should also feel that they are in the driver’s seat and that they can use their knowledge of their own work to decide what tools to test and how to test them.

The Teams Getting AI Right

Armed with an understanding of what AI implementation should look like in an ideal world, who is actually walking the walk and finding success? In short, agile marketers are far ahead of their non-agile counterparts.

Fully agile marketers are more than three times as likely as somewhat agile ones to have fully integrated AI. What about non-agile marketers? Despite surveying 600+ marketers on four different continents, the report was unable to identify a single non-agile marketer who had fully integrated AI into their work.

ai adoption across levels of marketing agility graph

What Sets Agile Marketers Apart

Agile ways of working are ideal to tackle problems like integrating AI into marketing processes. The report found that those same fully agile marketers had more autonomy and focused on a smaller number of high-value activities. Agile marketers in general also tend to experiment and iterate more. Together, these characteristics make agile marketers ideally suited for the challenge of AI integration.

Better yet, the report found that two thirds of fully agile teams said that AI had significantly enhanced their agility. This suggests a symbiotic relationship, where agility makes it easier for marketing teams to embrace AI, which then makes them more agile.

How Senior Leaders Can Support AI Implementation

Saying that fully agile marketers are better able to implement AI is one thing, but how can senior leaders effectively use that information? The answer is simple. Begin to cultivate an agile mindset and culture centered around experimentation and continuous improvement. Related to this, the report asked marketers about what kinds of agile education were most effective at doing this.

Certification courses were a clear winner, but they can also be quite expensive. Fortunately, both free and self-paced learning offer more affordability and flexibility, particularly for team members just getting started. All that said, even coaching and AI were rated as valuable by most marketers, so there are plenty of good options.

That said, there are a few principles to keep in mind when building an AI-ready agile culture. The first is to balance your education time with real-world application time by following the 70-20-10 rule. This rule suggests dedicating 10% of your education time to formal learning like certification courses. Another 20% should go to things like coaching, mentoring or working with internal agile groups. The remaining 70% should focus on applying all those learnings to your real-world challenges. Ultimately, as important as it is to learn agile principles, applying them to the realities of modern marketing always requires some adaptation.

Transforming a regular marketing team into an agile one doesn’t happen overnight. But with AI becoming more vital for marketing success by the day, it’s also never been more important. Agile ways of working were designed for precisely this kind of fast-paced environment where testing and implementing new technologies and processes is essential for success.

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