January 12, 2026

6 AI Predictions That Will Shape Marketing in 2026

ICOM Network’s AI Team

Rob Scherzer, Miguel Pereira, Luke Azzopardi, Fabian Miranda, Dan Holmgren, JD Guenther, and Harry Moller, members of the Global Artificial Intelligence Working Group within the international ICOM Network, explore the evolution of AI in the industry. The network comprises more than seventy independent agencies worldwide.

A year ago, seven AI leaders from some of the industry’s most respected independent agencies—Malta to Mexico City, Madrid to Seattle—made six predictions about where AI in marketing was headed. Between the 7 of us, we’ve got more AI failures and breakthroughs under our belts than you’d believe. It’s because we’d rather be wrong trying than right waiting. Last year we predicted 2025 would split the industry between AI sophisticates and everyone else. Here’s how that aged:

2025 AI PREDICTION REPORT CARD

NAILED IT
AI Agents Proved Essential (A+)
Generic AI Content Hit a Wall (A-)
The Builder/Borrower Split Is Proving True (B+)

DIRECTIONALLY CORRECT
The Watershed Full AI Campaign Moment (B-)
Client Data Analysis Got Secure (B-)

RIGHT TRACK, WRONG SPEED
AI Advertising Platforms Reshape Global Media Spend (D)

We got a lot right. But we also learned AI’s impact moves at different speeds. The technology evolves fast—agents, security, custom models all got remarkably sophisticated exactly as predicted. But, the industry adopts slow. We were maybe over-optimistic about how quickly organizations would restructure around these capabilities. The builder/borrower split is real and widening, the borrowers just don’t know they’re borrowers yet. The ad platform migration is underway, just being rolled out strategically because reshaping $300B in search requires precision, not speed.

ALRIGHT. The 2026 predictions:

1. Authenticity Will Prove Itself Marketing’s Scarcest (and Most Important) Resource

AI-generated content is already everywhere, and human-made work is starting to feel rare (and dare we say valuable again). We know that authenticity has always mattered, but now it may just emerge as THE biggest brand differentiator. The imperfect stuff, the emotional stuff, the things that can’t be mass-produced at scale. Brands that demonstrate real authorship and aren’t afraid to show vulnerability will build moats competitors using AI can’t cross. AI lost its mystique somewhere around the millionth AI-generated Sora video. What audiences crave now is what feels genuinely human—authored, intentional, grounded. The newest differentiator isn’t volume, it’s humanity.

2. Hyper-Personalization Will Define Performance Marketing

Real-time personalization is going to deliver the highest media ROI in 2026, especially on Retail Media Networks like Amazon and Walmart where they know disturbingly specific things about you in very deterministic ways. Eventually, AI-inferred context is likely to replace demographics and psychographics entirely (turns out knowing what you’re doing and buying right now matters a lot more than knowing who you said you were in a survey five years ago).

3. AI Voice Tech Clears the Uncanny Valley

AI voices will leap right over the uncanny valley in 2026. Nuanced, genuine emotional range that can make you forget you’re talking to a machine. Voice becomes the easiest way for everyday marketers and agencies to get into AI. We also think that navigating and interacting with the web with voice is likely going to become a new normal. We’re calling it “the conversational web,” and it’s going to feel both completely natural and deeply weird at the same time (look how fast we all adopted biometric payments with tap-to-pay).

4. Marketing Talent Needs to Evolve

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: being “just” a strategist, copywriter or designer isn’t going to cut it anymore. Not because those skills don’t matter (they matter more than ever) but because the bar just got higher (again). Traditional marketing roles will morph into hybrid positions where AI fluency sits alongside creative or strategic expertise. Those who figure out how to wield AI as a creative amplifier rather than a replacement become incredibly valuable, incredibly fast (to be clear, we believe agencies who invest in their talent to evolve will navigate this transition far more smoothly and successfully than those who are hyper reactive & quickly swap people out). Nobody has the luxury of staying in their lane anymore. The new MVPs are the ones who get weird with it—combining skills in ways that didn’t make sense before AI made them possible.

5. AI Agents Begin Redrawing Traditional Customer Journeys

Think of it this way: instead of Googling “best running shoes” and clicking through ten websites with ads, you’ll just ask ChatGPT or Claude and get a direct answer, maybe even buy right there. No clicks. No website visits. Maybe no ads to be seen at all. That’s a future AI agents are likely to create, and we’ll start feeling it in 2026. It’s going to fundamentally reshape how people buy. The entire digital ad industry—worth almost a trillion dollars globally—is built on people clicking around the web. But if (when) AI agents start answering questions and completing tasks without sending people to websites, that whole ecosystem shrinks. Long term, publishers will lose traffic and advertisers will lose inventory; The game changes dramatically & GEO experts get to name their price.

6. AI’s Middleware Gets Crushed

The big LLM platforms are absorbing specialized capabilities directly, which means the middleware AI players are about to get squeezed hard. You know the ones, think AI writing assistants, content generators, social media caption tools; Basically any SaaS that took OpenAI or Anthropic’s models and added a shinier interface. The market’s splitting in two: sophisticated custom solutions built for specific problems on one end (think Harvey for legal AI or Glean for enterprise search) and commodity tools anyone can access on the other (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini). In the coming years, everything in between will disappear. Poof.

What did we miss? Anything you vehemently agree or disagree with? We’ll see you next year to tell you how we did.