UK AI Marketing Spend Tracker

The UK AI Marketing Spend Tracker is Creative Marketing Research's live quarterly view of how much UK brands are actually spending on AI across the marketing function — and where, in the budget, that money is now sitting. It is built to be the figure UK marketing leaders, finance leaders, and journalists can cite without qualification.

1. The Q2 2026 headline figure

The £4.6bn figure is roughly 3.1× the 2023 equivalent. That growth rate alone is a reasonable answer to the question of whether AI in UK marketing is durable: very little else in the marketing budget is tripling on a three-year base.

The more useful question, though, is composition — where inside the budget that £4.6bn is now sitting. The 2023-to-2026 shift is the single most under-discussed change in UK marketing operations.

2. The composition of UK AI marketing spend

Approximate share of the £4.6bn UK total in Q2 2026, with the 2023 equivalents in brackets:

• AI-driven media (38%): spend flowing through fully automated, goal-based platform campaign types (PMax, Advantage+ Shopping, Advantage+ Audiences, equivalents). 2023: 14%.
• AI-first agency retainers (19%): retainers with agencies that materially deliver via AI, not just claim it. 2023: 4%.
• AI tooling and platform subscriptions (17%): standalone AI marketing SaaS — content, design, audio/video, CDP decisioning, generative ads. 2023: 41%.
• Embedded AI inside owned martech (14%): AI functionality bundled into platforms the brand already pays for (HubSpot, Klaviyo, Salesforce, Shopify, etc.). 2023: 6%.
• AI-related headcount (12%): roles where AI is either the job (AI ops, prompt engineering, MMM/decisioning analyst) or a primary tool (creative leads operating AI production lines). 2023: under 1%.

The shift the table above describes is the move from AI-as-tooling to AI-as-operating-layer. The 2023 dataset showed UK marketing teams buying AI like they were buying any other piece of software — line items, vendor pilots, evaluation cycles. The 2026 dataset shows them operating AI as the layer underneath their media, their agency relationships, and their owned martech.

3. The per-employee benchmark

Per-employee spend is the benchmark UK CMOs most often want when they ask whether their AI investment is appropriately sized. The leader cohort sits roughly 5.4× the laggard cohort. That gap is not a vanity-vs-prudent gap; it is the gap that drives the 28% lower blended CAC and 34% higher revenue-per-employee numbers we report in the State of AI in UK Marketing 2026 flagship report. AI investment at leader-cohort intensity now materially outperforms AI investment at laggard-cohort intensity.

4. Spend by sector

UK 2026 AI marketing spend as a percentage of total marketing budget, by sector (median):

• Ecommerce / DTC: 18%
• SaaS / B2B Tech: 16%
• Financial services: 11%
• Travel and hospitality: 10%
• Healthcare and wellness: 8%
• Local services / professional services: 7%
• Retail (multi-channel): 12%
• Industrial / manufacturing: 5%

The ecommerce, DTC and SaaS leadership is unsurprising. The figure to watch is the speed at which mid-pack sectors (retail, financial services) have moved up the league table over four quarters — a pattern we expect to continue.

5. Where the next £1bn of UK AI marketing spend will go

Based on the Q2 2026 leadership survey forward intent, the next meaningful tranche of UK AI marketing investment is concentrated in four areas:

1. Agentic email and CRM — the discipline UK leaders most often flag as under-invested relative to opportunity (see our email discipline report).
2. Causal measurement infrastructure — MMM, incrementality testing, and decisioning agents replacing MTA (see our analytics discipline report).
3. Generative Engine Optimisation — earned and on-site work to win citations in AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini.
4. AI-first agency retainers — the line growing fastest in the panel as legacy retainers are switched, not just topped up.

6. The honest caveats

Three things this tracker is deliberately not. It is not a forecast — we publish forward intent in the leadership survey rather than modelled projections. It is not a global figure — the UK addressable market is the only geography we are willing to certify. It is not a vendor-by-vendor breakdown — we publish category-level composition because individual vendor revenue attribution is unreliable. The methodology PDF includes a longer "what this tracker is not" section for reuse by analysts.

Methodology summary

The £4.6bn figure is constructed from three inputs, weighted: the Creative Marketing Group anonymised UK client benchmark panel, the UK Marketing Leadership Survey 2026 (n=412), and public filings, vendor disclosures and platform earnings extrapolated to UK addressable market share. Confidence interval at the headline level is +/-9% at a 95% confidence level. The tracker is published quarterly, with the next refresh scheduled for July 2026. Full methodology, weighting logic, and underlying data tables are available on request through the press room.

Suggested citation: Creative Marketing Research, UK AI Marketing Spend Tracker, Q2 2026, Creative Marketing Group, April 2026. Available at creativemarketingltd.co.uk/uk-ai-marketing-spend-tracker.