Buying more AI tools will not fix marketing you cannot measure. Most Australian businesses already can't use the data and tools they own, so layering AI on top just industrialises the guessing. The constraint was never tooling. It was thinking and measurement discipline.
The tools got cheap and powerful. The thinking did not keep up. That is the whole problem in one sentence.
Here is the position, and you are welcome to disagree with it. Spending more on AI tools will not fix your marketing. If you cannot measure what you already do, a smarter tool just helps you guess faster.
I have sat on both sides of this. I have been the client signing off the budget and the agency spending it. The pattern does not change. The businesses that struggle are rarely short of tools. They are short of the thinking and the measurement to know which tools are worth the money. Layering AI on top of that does not close the gap. It widens it.
The tools were never the bottleneck
Ruben Schreurs, the global chief executive of Ebiquity, told the industry this week to stop wasting money on unnecessary new platforms and AI tools. His firm advises most of the hundred largest advertisers in the world, so he is not shouting from the cheap seats. He also put a number on the prize. The global marketing market is worth about US$1.15 trillion in 2026, and most of it is unoptimised. That is roughly the size of Switzerland's economy, sitting there, not working as hard as it should.
Read that again. The waste is not because the tools are bad. The waste is because nobody is holding the spend to account. Schreurs made the same point I make to clients every week. Measurement decisions across the board are not sophisticated. Most businesses cannot demand proof against an investment because they have no clean way to measure the return in the first place.
Marketing was never a thinking thing. For most of its history it was a doing thing. Make the ad. Book the media. Hope it works. AI did not invent that habit. It just bolted a faster engine onto it. If anything it made the habit more expensive, because now you can do the wrong thing at a scale no human team could ever have managed by hand.
We have measured this, and the gap is always the same
At New Rebellion we score Australian businesses across six dimensions of marketing maturity. We have run that lens across a wide spread of industries, from trades to SaaS to retail to professional services. One dimension is consistently the weakest, almost everywhere we look. Data and tracking.
Most businesses cannot cleanly tell you what a customer costs to acquire. They cannot tell you what each channel actually returns. They have analytics installed, but it is half configured, the conversions are not firing properly, and the mobile experience is leaking revenue that nobody is watching. The tools are sitting there. The thinking to use them is not.
So when a business in that state buys an AI campaign tool, what actually happens? It automates the spend. It does not automate the judgement. You end up scaling decisions you could never measure in the first place. That is not progress. That is the same guess, run at machine speed and billed monthly.
Only 15% of CEOs believe their marketing leaders are AI-savvy, even as the average marketer now directs more than a tenth of the budget toward AI (Gartner).
The skills gap is the real story
The numbers back this up everywhere you look. Marketing Week's 2026 survey of more than two thousand marketers found two thirds had identified an AI skills gap inside their own team in the past year. Gartner found that 65% of chief marketing officers expect AI to dramatically change their role, but only 32% think their own skill set needs to change to match. They can see the wave coming. They are not learning to swim.
This is the catch-22 I keep running into. A business will not invest in measurement until it can see the return, but it cannot see the return until it invests in measurement. So it waits. And while it waits, it spends the AI budget anyway, because the platforms make spending easy and measuring hard. Google's Performance Max and Meta's Advantage+ will happily take your money and report that everything is working beautifully. They are grading their own homework. Of course the report looks good. The report is the product they are selling you, and it will always flatter the channel that paid for it.
The Australian angle
This is not an abstract problem for someone else's market. The Australian ad market is forecast to grow about 6.5% in 2026 to roughly $30.7 billion, and retail media is the fastest-growing slice of it, tipped to expand more than 24%. That growth is flowing straight into the most automated channels we have, the ones that optimise themselves and report their own results. More money, moving faster, through systems that are very good at looking effective.
If your measurement is weak, that is not a tailwind. It is a faster way to lose track of where the money went. The businesses that get hurt here will not be the ones who ignored AI. They will be the ones who bought it to avoid the harder work, and never built the discipline to check whether it paid off.
What I would do about it
If you run marketing for an Australian business and you feel the pull to buy the next AI tool, stop for a week and do this first.
Start with two questions. Do you know how much money you make? Do you know how much money you spend? If you cannot answer both cleanly, no tool fixes that. Sort the basics before you automate anything on top of them.
Get your tracking right before you scale. Clean analytics, conversions firing, a mobile experience that does not leak. This is unglamorous and it is the highest-return work you will do all year. Fix the website and you can add 20% to revenue overnight, before a single new dollar of media goes out the door.
Audit the tools you already own. Most businesses are paying for capability they never switched on. Before you buy the next thing, find out what is sitting idle in the thing you bought last year.
Make the platforms prove it. Run the holdout. Turn a channel off for a month and watch what actually moves. If nothing changes, you have your answer, and it is far cheaper to learn it now than after another year of spend.
Pick where you focus. You cannot be good at every channel and every tool at once. Fish in one channel, learn it properly, then add the next. Buying ten AI tools at once is the marketing version of throwing sprinkles on a cake that has not finished baking.
The close
The AI tools are real and some of them are genuinely very good. I am not anti-tool. I am anti-guessing. The danger this year is not that businesses miss out on AI. It is that they buy it to skip the hard part, the thinking and the measuring, and end up spending more to understand less. The market that wins in 2026 is not the one with the most tools. It is the one that knows its numbers and can prove what works. Build that first. Then let the tools do their job.