Kana Announces New Research: 70% of Enterprises Already Run AI Agents in Marketing, But Ownership Remains Unclear

Kana, the agentic marketing platform founded by the pioneers behind Krux, Rapt, and Habu, released The Agentic Divide, a study of 225 senior marketing, data, and AI leaders at U.S. enterprises with $250M or more in annual revenue. The research finds that the enterprise AI marketing debate has moved past whether to adopt agentic systems and straight into a harder set of questions about who owns them, how ready organizations really are, and whether confidence is outpacing reality.

“What this data shows is that the market has sprinted quickly through the adoption decision and landed in a harder place: governance gaps, contested ownership, and confidence levels that haven’t been tested in production yet.”

Key Findings:

The market has left the pilot phase. Seventy percent of respondents already run custom AI agents handling real marketing tasks in production. Only 3% report no marketing AI use at all. The question executives are wrestling with is no longer adoption, it’s whether they can scale and govern what is already running.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Theresa Pham, Head of Product @ Wayvia

Ownership is the unresolved question that creates organizational risk. Across the full sample, 40% say the Chief AI Officer should own agentic marketing strategy and execution. AI leaders strongly agree, with 52% pointing to the Chief AI Officer (CAIO). Marketing executives are the exception: they are the only cohort that leans toward their own function and toward shared ownership. Until enterprises resolve who is accountable, agentic marketing initiatives risk stalling in the gap between teams that each assume someone else owns the outcome.

Confidence is running well ahead of proof. 76% of leaders say their governance model is ready for supervised AI decisions, and 86% rate their data infrastructure as ready. But those same leaders name data governance readiness and data quality/hygiene as their second and third biggest obstacles to agentic marketing progress. The gap between self-assessed readiness and production reality is the most telling tension in the data.

The pace of change is steep and driven by fear, not plans. 82% of respondents expect AI agents to handle at least a third of routine marketing decisions within two years; 46% expect a majority of those decisions to be handled by AI agents. Yet the overwhelming driver of investment is competitive anxiety rather than operational readiness: 69% of respondents say concern about falling behind peers outweighs every other risk, including security and data privacy.

All three functions agree on where to focus their agents. Despite disagreeing on ownership, marketing, data, and AI leaders converge on the same top use cases: real-time personalized customer engagement and autonomous campaign optimization across channels. The divide is about accountability, not how to apply agentic marketing.

“The enterprises we talk to are not debating whether agentic marketing is real, they’re already making decisions about where and how to run it,” said Tom Chavez, Co-founder and CEO of Kana. “What this data shows is that the market has sprinted quickly through the adoption decision and landed in a harder place: governance gaps, contested ownership, and confidence levels that haven’t been tested in production yet. The next two years will separate the organizations that built the right infrastructure from those that moved fast on the wrong foundation.”