AI is changing marketing. Here’s what we’re paying attention to.
Updated: Aug 28
AI is no longer sitting somewhere off to the side of marketing waiting for everyone to decide whether it matters.
It’s already in search, advertising platforms, creative tools, analytics and the way people research, compare and make decisions.
It’s also already part of how we work at Bungalow.
We use it for research, analysis, working through strategy, spotting patterns, improving workflows and adapting content across channels. Sometimes it saves time. Sometimes it helps us look at something differently.
Sometimes the best decision is still not to use it at all.
That’s the part we’re interested in.
Not adding AI to everything because apparently that’s what we’re all supposed to be doing now.
Understanding where it genuinely makes the work better, where it simply makes things faster, and where the human thinking is still the whole point.
Search is becoming a conversation
Search is probably the clearest example of how quickly things are shifting.
Google says its AI Overviews now reach more than 2.5 billion people every month, while its more conversational AI Mode has already passed one billion monthly users.
People can ask longer, more specific questions, continue the conversation and get an answer pulled together from multiple sources without necessarily clicking through to a website at all.
People are also increasingly using platforms such as ChatGPT to research businesses, compare options and help make decisions.
Adobe’s 2026 consumer research found that around one-quarter of customers now count AI-powered platforms among the sources they use most for research, purchase decisions and recommendations.
That changes what visibility means for a business.
A Pew Research Center study found users clicked a traditional Google result on 15% of visits without an AI summary, compared with 8% when an AI summary appeared.
Which raises a pretty important question.
When someone asks Google, ChatGPT or another AI platform a question our business should be a good answer to, are we part of the response?
There isn’t one clever trick that guarantees it.
A lot of the foundations are reassuringly familiar.
Be clear about what you do.
Have useful information on your website.
Show genuine expertise.
Keep your business information accurate.
Build a reputation beyond your own website.
Give people, and increasingly the platforms helping them make decisions, enough good information to understand why your business is relevant.
So no, SEO is not suddenly dead.
But the way people search, and the way businesses get surfaced within that search, is changing.
Advertising platforms can do more
AI is also doing more of the heavy lifting inside paid advertising.
Google and Meta already use machine learning across audiences, placements, bidding and campaign delivery.
Newer systems can interpret website content, match campaigns to a broader range of customer intent and create or adapt advertising assets.
There’s real opportunity in that.
These platforms can process far more signals than any person could manually and respond to changes in behaviour incredibly quickly.
But better automation does not magically fix a badly thought-through campaign.
If anything, it makes the inputs more important.
Good conversion tracking matters.
Good creative matters.
Landing pages matter.
Budgets matter.
Knowing what a genuinely valuable lead or result looks like matters.
The marketer’s role starts shifting away from pulling every lever manually and more towards giving the system better direction.
Better technology gives good strategy more leverage.
That’s the bit worth paying attention to
AI is expanding the creative process
Creative is another interesting one.
AI can help teams get from an initial thought to a much wider range of possibilities very quickly.
It can support research, explore visual directions, test language, adapt formats, organise information and give creative people more ways to develop an idea.
That can be incredibly useful.
It can also create an enormous amount of very average stuff, very quickly.
When production becomes easier, the thing that separates good work from everything else isn’t simply whether you can make it.
It’s whether the idea is any good.
Whether it feels right for the brand.
Whether there’s taste behind it.
Whether somebody has made an actual decision about what should exist and why.
Adobe’s research found that 69% of customers give a promotional email, advertisement or social post five seconds or less to capture their attention. It also found 39% feel overwhelmed by the amount of promotional content they receive from individual brands.
So the opportunity is definitely not to use AI to make more things for the sake of making more things.
It’s to use it where it helps us make the right things better.
What should businesses be doing now?
For most businesses, we don’t think the answer is to rush out and create a giant AI strategy.
There are some much more practical places to start:
Make sure your website clearly explains who you help, what you offer and why someone should choose you.
Create genuinely useful content around the questions your customers actually ask.
Strengthen the things that make your brand recognisable, including your point of view and your voice.
Keep building direct channels such as email rather than relying entirely on search and social platforms.
Make sure your advertising and analytics are measuring actions that actually matter to the business.
Look at the repetitive or time-heavy parts of your marketing and work out where AI could make them faster or smarter.
Put some sensible boundaries around accuracy, privacy, quality and brand.
None of that is particularly futuristic.
Which is probably the point.
What are we doing about it?
We’re using AI already, and we’re spending a lot more time understanding where all of this is heading.
Search visibility is a big one.
So is advertising automation.
Research and analysis.
Content systems.
Creative development.
Reporting.
And the operational stuff around marketing that can quietly eat a ridiculous amount of time.
We’re testing things, questioning things and paying attention to the gap between what everyone is currently shouting about and what is actually useful to the kinds of businesses we work with.
Some things will be worth adopting.
Some will be genuinely transformative.
Some businesses can safely ignore.
And there will almost certainly be things everyone thinks are terribly clever today that look completely ridiculous in twelve months.
That’s fine.
We’re not interested in adding AI to the Bungalow menu because it sounds current.
We’re interested in understanding it well enough to know when it makes the work better, when it creates a real commercial advantage and when the smartest thing to do is leave it alone.
We’ll keep sharing what we learn as we go.
What’s changing.
What isn’t.
What we think businesses should be paying attention to.
And what probably doesn’t deserve quite as much attention as the LinkedIn influencer with an affiliate link would have us believe.
Because the tools are going to keep changing.
Knowing what to do with them is the interesting bit.
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