Key Takeaways
- Consumers are increasingly relying on AI-generated inbox summaries, with many making decisions without reading the full email.
- Marketers are investing more in AI and email, but most still lack visibility into how AI affects discovery, trust, and campaign measurement.
As artificial intelligence (AI) changes how consumers discover products and interact with brand content, marketers lack the visibility, strategy and measurement tools to keep pace. That’s the key finding of new data from Validity Q1 2026 Marketer Survey.
Drawing on responses from more than 500 U.S. marketers and 1,000 U.S. consumers, the research exposes a growing disconnect: marketers are betting big on AI while consumers are using AI to tune them out.
For marketers, the uncertainty begins internally. Nearly half report having only a limited or basic understanding of how consumers use generative AI for product discovery and purchasing decisions. At the same time, 44% expect agentic commerce to meaningfully impact their business within the next 12 months.
Validity’s Cynthia Price on the Report’s Findings
Marketers and consumers are at an inflection point, said Cynthia Price, SVP of Marketing at Validity.
“Brands are scaling campaigns with AI, while consumers are letting AI tools curate their inboxes and that shift creates a real opening for the brands that get ahead of it,” said Price in a statement. “The ones who invest in smarter measurement, optimize for AI-driven discovery, and get their foundational data in order won’t just stay visible, they’ll pull ahead.”
What is the Impact AI is Having on Email Campaigns
The report found that 55% of consumers now make decisions based on AI-generated email summaries alone, without reading the full email—that includes 35% who skip the full email, 15% who choose not to open it, and 5% who delete based on the summary alone. Additionally, 40% say they are less likely to trust marketing emails they know were written by AI.
Marketers and consumers are interacting with email in different ways. While 43% of marketers plan to increase email investment this year, 1 in 5 consumers are already making inbox decisions based on AI summaries alone, never opening the full message. Other key findings from the reports include:
- Consumer adoption of AI for shopping is accelerating faster than marketers’ awareness of it. While 31% of consumers say they use AI for product research more than they did a year ago, 49% of marketers have only a limited or basic understanding of this shift, and 74% cannot measure it when it happens.
- Marketers and consumers both have significant data anxieties, but they are worrying about opposite things. As 25% of marketers cite poor internal data quality as a top barrier to AI adoption, the same percenrage of consumers cite misuse of their personal data as their number one concern about AI marketing.
- Brands are scaling AI content at the exact moment consumer trust in AI-generated marketing is most fragile. Notably, 40% of consumers say they would trust a retailer’s emails less if they knew they were written by AI, yet 74% of marketers are already deploying or testing AI content. Meanwhile, 15% of consumers have already turned off AI email features entirely, and only 10% completely trust AI summaries to accurately represent email content.
