87% of marketing teams now use AI for email but only 6% are high performers. The gains are real when the work is good, but most teams bolted AI onto the old workflow instead of rebuilding around it. Email is the channel you own, so get it right.
Almost everyone uses AI for email. Almost nobody has rebuilt their email program around what it makes possible. That gap is where the results hide.
AI can write an email campaign in seconds. It cannot decide whether the campaign is worth sending. That gap is the whole story of email marketing in 2026. The tools got radically easier and the results did not automatically follow.
The adoption is near universal. 87% of marketing teams now use AI for email, but only 6% qualify as high performers. The performance gains are real when the work is good. AI-generated subject lines lift open rates by up to 22%, AI-personalised content drives 29% higher open rates and 41% higher click-through, and AI-driven campaigns are pulling 41% higher revenue than traditional ones. The upside exists. Most teams are just not capturing it.
The reason is simple. Plugging AI into the old workflow makes you faster at the old work. It does not make the work better. The strategy, the judgement and the understanding of the customer are still yours, and those are the parts that decide whether an email earns the send.
Why it matters
Email is the channel you actually own. No platform sits between you and the inbox taking a cut or changing the rules. That makes it the most valuable place to get AI right, and the easiest place to get it lazily wrong. An AI that writes a fast, generic email at scale just helps you bore your list faster.
For Australian businesses, owned email is the antidote to rising ad costs and platform dependence. AI should make that channel sharper, not blander.
The share of marketing teams using AI for email, against the share that qualify as high performers.
What to do about it
The easy part got easier. The hard part is still the part that matters. Do that part well.