Nadja Bellan-White, CEO of M&C Saatchi in North America, said at a 2026 media buying conference that 85% of the briefs clients send to the agency are written with AI tools. In her words, reliance on AI for drafting briefs is approaching a tipping point, and the situation is, in her view, a little absurd.
She acknowledged that AI is useful as a sounding board, but said the decision should be made by a person who understands the client's and the market's context.
The Basis survey ran from July 16 to August 14, 2026, and involved 184 specialists from agencies, brands and media. According to the report, the survey of 184 marketing and advertising professionals across agencies, brands and publishers ran from July 16 to August 14, 2026. Roughly half of the surveyed organizations use AI agents. Among them, 56.4% assign agents to draft campaign briefs, and another 72.3% use agents for reporting and analytics. Those agents are running reporting and analytics (72.3%), drafting campaign briefs (56.4%), creating content (45.7%), and planning media (35.1%).
The figures 85% and 56.4% measure different things. The first is one agency's estimate of incoming client briefs. The second is the share of organizations that use agents for a specific task. The Basis survey does not provide overall data on what share of briefs in the industry is written by AI.
Control lags behind adoption. Just 6.5% of marketing organizations evaluate their AI investments against defined benchmarks, that is, they compare returns from AI with preset targets. For agencies that receive client briefs running dozens of pages, this means quality checks fall on the same people who read them.
