A new Gartner survey released at the firm’s Marketing Symposium in London yesterday puts a number on something most business owners already feel in their gut: AI automation of marketing work is about to move fast.

Right now, marketing leaders say AI handles around 16% of their marketing workflows. By 2028, that figure is expected to hit 36%. That’s more than double in two years.

For business owners who are still thinking of AI as a “someday” project, this data is a wake-up call. The companies moving now are the ones that will be operating at 36% automation in 2028. The ones waiting will still be figuring out where to start.

What Gartner Actually Measured

The survey polled marketing leaders at scale, and the findings were presented at Gartner’s Marketing Symposium on May 11 in London, with a second event running June 8-10 in Denver.

The 16% to 36% jump is significant because it does not represent a gradual linear adoption curve. It reflects an acceleration that is already being felt across campaign management, content creation, audience segmentation, performance reporting, and customer journey personalisation. These are not theoretical future use cases. They are happening at companies of every size right now.

This survey sits alongside other Gartner research that paints a consistent picture. In April, Gartner reported that 80% of CEOs say AI will force them to overhaul their operational capabilities. Back in January, Gartner predicted that 60% of brands would deploy agentic AI for personalised, one-to-one customer interactions by 2028.

The marketing automation data is not a standalone finding. It is part of a broader transformation that is reshaping how businesses operate across every function.

The Gap That Actually Matters

The most important thing to notice in this data is not the 36% endpoint. It is the gap between those who get there and those who do not.

If the average sits at 36% by 2028, that means some companies will be at 50% or higher while others barely move past their current baseline. The gap in productivity, speed, and cost efficiency between those groups will be significant.

Gartner’s research consistently shows that the companies seeing real returns from AI are not the ones who adopted it fastest. They are the ones who adopted it with a clear strategy. They knew which workflows to automate, had the data infrastructure to support AI properly, and built internal capability to manage and optimise their AI tools over time.

That combination of strategy, data, and capability is harder to build than most people expect. It takes time, and it takes the right foundation.

The Practical Implication for Business Owners

If you run a business and marketing feels like it is eating too much of your team’s time, this is the data that should prompt action.

Content creation, social scheduling, email sequences, ad copy, performance analysis, audience reporting: all of these are areas where AI is already taking on meaningful workload for businesses that have set things up properly. The leaders in Gartner’s survey are not guessing that they will reach 36% automation by 2028. They are already building toward it.

The businesses that will struggle are the ones treating AI like a single tool you add on. Stacking a few AI subscriptions on top of a slow, manual operation rarely produces meaningful efficiency gains. What actually works is mapping your workflows, identifying the highest-value automation opportunities, and building from there with proper data governance and team training in place.

What This Means for Business

The shift from 16% to 36% AI automation in marketing is not just a statistic. It is a signal about competitive speed. The businesses that automate more of their marketing work will move faster on campaigns, test more ideas, respond more quickly to market changes, and spend less time on repetitive production tasks.

For business owners, there are a few practical questions worth asking now:

Which marketing tasks does your team do repeatedly that follow a predictable pattern? Those are almost certainly automatable today.

Do you have clean, well-organised data behind your marketing? AI amplifies good data and exposes bad data. The foundation matters.

Does your team know how to work effectively with AI tools, or are they adopting them ad hoc? Structured training pays off faster than self-directed experimentation.

At Enterprise DNA, we work with businesses at exactly this point in the journey. Whether that is through structured AI and data training for your team or through Omni’s AI agent workforce that handles operational work directly, the starting point is always the same: understand your workflows and your data before you automate.

The Gartner numbers confirm the direction. What matters now is which side of the gap your business ends up on.