Nearly every marketing team on the planet is now running AI-generated creative. Nearly every consumer wishes they would stop.
That is the uncomfortable paradox at the heart of Canva's third annual State of Marketing and AI report, released in mid-May 2026. The study, conducted in partnership with The Harris Poll across 1,415 marketing leaders and 3,547 consumers in seven countries, finds that 97 percent of marketing leaders use AI in their daily creative work and 99 percent plan to increase their AI budgets this year. But on the other side of the screen, seven in ten consumers say AI-generated ads feel like they are missing something fundamental — their soul.
The data does not describe a technology problem. It describes a trust crisis.
The Numbers Behind the Backlash
The headline figure — 70 percent of consumers saying AI ads lack soul — is striking on its own. But the report reveals an entire ecosystem of skepticism. Sixty-five percent of respondents say AI-generated ads are so obvious that they find them laughable. Seventy-eight percent say they would rather see ads made by people, even if AI could produce objectively better ones. And 87 percent believe the best advertising still requires a human touch.
Meanwhile, mentions of "AI slop" — the colloquial term for low-effort, visibly machine-generated content — have surged ninefold according to media monitoring data cited in the report. Forty-one percent of marketing leaders themselves acknowledge it as a considerable challenge.
"AI has changed how marketing gets made, but not what makes it effective," said Emma Robinson, Head of B2B Growth Marketing at Canva. "Speed and scale matter, but they don't build trust on their own. The opportunity isn't only producing more content. It's building smarter systems where AI drives efficiency while brand governance and creative judgment protect what makes a brand distinctive."
The Productivity Paradox
The tension becomes sharper when you examine just how deeply AI has embedded itself in marketing operations. According to the report, 89 percent of marketing leaders save at least four hours per week using AI tools, and a full quarter — 25 percent — save an entire workday of eight or more hours weekly. Sixty-eight percent report an increase in marketing-influenced business decisions since adopting AI.
Many leaders now describe AI as a strategic partner rather than a simple tool: 41 percent say it functions as their "director" and 39 percent call it their "collaborator."
But the unintended consequence of all that velocity is volume without vision. When everyone has the same generative tools producing content at the same industrial speed, the output converges toward a bland, algorithmic mean. Consumers have noticed. Sixty-nine percent believe the future of advertising will look and feel like homogeneous AI-generated content unless something changes.
What Consumers Actually Want
The report paints a more nuanced picture than simple AI rejection. Sixty-eight percent of consumers say they do not mind AI in advertising if it makes ads more helpful or relevant. Among Gen Z and Millennials, 70 percent say they pay more attention to the "vibe" of an ad than to how it was made, and 69 percent say they do not mind AI polish as long as real people are featured.
What consumers are demanding is transparency and governance. Seventy-four percent say they would feel more comfortable with AI-generated advertising if formal company policies governed its use. Fifty-three percent cite data protection as the top trust-builder, while 52 percent want explicit disclosure of AI use. Eighty percent wish they could adjust how personal ads get, describing a desire for something like a privacy slider.
Perhaps most telling: 70 percent of consumers believe it will someday be impossible to tell whether an ad was AI-generated without disclosure, and 56 percent expect that inflection point within two to five years.
The Skills That Cannot Be Prompted
When asked what AI will never fully replicate, both marketers and consumers converge on distinctly human capabilities. Forty-two percent of marketing leaders pointed to empathy and emotional intelligence. Forty-one percent cited the kind of human imperfection that sparks originality. And another 41 percent named brand intuition and creative judgment — the accumulated understanding of what a brand means and how it should feel.
Three-quarters of marketing leaders expect creative roles to grow over the next five years, with greater emphasis on imagination, judgment, and strategic direction rather than production.
The Road Ahead
The report arrives at a moment when the marketing industry is caught between two forces moving in opposite directions. AI investment is accelerating on a near-vertical trajectory — up from 94 percent adoption in the 2025 edition of the same survey to 97 percent daily use this year. But consumer trust in AI-generated content is eroding just as quickly.
The brands that navigate this divide will be the ones that treat AI disclosure not as a regulatory burden but as a signal of intent — a way of communicating that creative decisions still involve human judgment, even when machines handle the execution. The brands that do not will keep feeding the ninefold surge in content that consumers can spot, laugh at, and scroll past.
The soul, it turns out, is not a feature you can automate. It is the residue of someone caring enough to make a choice.
“AI has changed how marketing gets made, but not what makes it effective.”— Emma Robinson, Head of B2B Growth Marketing, Canva