LONDON & CANNES—June 16, 2025—The rapidly expanding use of AI in marketing is widening a performance gap between top-tier growth companies and the rest of the field, where AI adoption and value realization is much more limited, analysis from Bain & Company, released today, reveals.

Effective exploitation of AI is proving crucial to marketing outperformance by major businesses leading in its use, Bain finds, based on an analysis of 1,200 senior marketing executives worldwide. The leading companies surveyed are achieving median revenue growth six times higher than competitors, while their average marketing spending is just 1.5 times higher – implying a four-times-higher marketing return on investment, the study shows.

Today’s report identifies the key drivers of world-leading marketing that separate the fastest growers in market share and revenue. AI is emerging as a core ingredient enabling the leaders’ success.

“The continuing rapid acceleration of AI-use across marketing activities is changing the game in far-reaching ways and leaves companies in every industry with no place to hide in harnessing the technology to deliver marketing performance and growth. Our analysis shows that AI is demanding excellence in execution across all aspects of marketing. The best marketers marry technical fluency with insights that inform human storytelling – and it’s paying off in market share and growth,” Laura Beaudin, Bain partner and leader of the firm’s Marketing Excellence practice, commented.

Bain maps out the drivers which are being powerfully leveraged by the leading players as 12 “hallmarks” of success, across “the new four Cs” of marketing leadership: comprehensive AI; consumer obsession; continuous experimentation; and commanding attention.

Examining comprehensive exploitation of AI by the companies leading in marketing, the report finds that the leaders are 10 times more likely to see AI and machine learning as core capabilities, correlated with more than a doubling of sales growth on average. Leaders are also six times more likely to have 25 or more AI use cases in production. Companies leading in marketing are also scaling up generative AI more broadly across go-to-market functions, from customer experience to media buying, from campaign optimization to creative testing.

Under consumer obsession, Bain highlights hallmarks of success including that leaders are four times more likely to enrich their first-party data with third-party data so that when using enriched data they can realize more than double the average sales growth of laggards. Leaders are also more likely to leverage AI to deliver the enrichment of their data.

In the category of continuous experimentation, Bain finds that the best performing companies are eight times more likely to perform 100 or more marketing experiments each month, while the leaders are twice as likely to scale learnings from these experiments across their organizations. As AI is bringing down the marginal cost of content creation, marketers that have testing and scaling processes and talent in place are benefiting in their ability to push experiments much more rapidly.

Leaders also seek to command attention by balancing brand activity with modular, automated marketing technology, the report says. The leading performers are eight times more likely to use AI-powered, customizable tech for use cases and business outcomes. Leaders are 2.5 times more likely to have mature marketing technology stacks across four areas: (1) data collection and enrichment; (2) measurement; (3) automation; and (4) workflow management.

Jeff Katzin, partner in Bain’s Marketing Excellence practice, added: “The hallmarks of marketing leadership we’ve mapped out chart how the leading players are not just using AI but embracing it in every aspect of their marketing strategy and execution. These leaders don’t stop at AI-driven workflow redesign. They enrich first-party data and use predictive analytics to better anticipate consumer needs. They experiment relentlessly with formats, channels, and audiences. And they own the creative process, integrating emerging tools like agentic AI search.”

Media Contacts:

For questions, or to request an interview with the authors, please get in touch.

Gary Duncan (London) — Email: gary.duncan@bain.com

Amanda Folsom (Boston) — Email: amanda.folsom@bain.com

Ann Lee (Singapore) — Email: ann.lee@bain.com

About Bain & Company 

Bain & Company is a global consultancy that helps the world’s most ambitious change makers define the future. 

Across 65 cities in 40 countries, we work alongside our clients as one team with a shared ambition to achieve extraordinary results, outperform the competition, and redefine industries. We complement our tailored, integrated expertise with a vibrant ecosystem of digital innovators to deliver better, faster, and more enduring outcomes. Our 10-year commitment to invest more than $1 billion in pro bono services brings our talent, expertise, and insight to organizations tackling today’s urgent challenges in education, racial equity, social justice, economic development, and the environment. We earned a platinum rating from EcoVadis, the leading platform for environmental, social, and ethical performance ratings for global supply chains, putting us in the top 1% of all companies. Since our founding in 1973, we have measured our success by the success of our clients, and we proudly maintain the highest level of client advocacy in the industry.