Marketing led the AI charge. Now let’s bring everyone else with us

Here's something that doesn't get said enough: marketing didn't wait to be told about AI.  

According to research by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), marketing is the number one business function where UK organisations are already using or actively planning to use AI - ahead of IT, ahead of operations, ahead of finance. It moved first. It experimented. It’s where (rightly or wrongly) the use cases are being built and, in many places, the business cases too. That's a genuine leadership story and it's one the industry should own with confidence.  

The advancement of AI doesn’t appear to be slowing down any time soon, driven largely by the huge potential that it has to transform business strategy and operations alike. Unsurprisingly, according to a recent Accenture report, 86 per cent of C-suite leaders are therefore planning to increase AI investment this year, with 78 per cent now seeing AI as more beneficial to revenue growth than cost reduction.   

So while marketing is adopting AI fastest, the most urgent opportunity is accelerating that adoption across the rest of the organisation, through practical support, skills, and communication that actually meets people where they are.  

The gap we're not talking about  

While marketing has been getting fluent in AI, research has also shown this isn’t the case for others. According to DSIT’s AI Adoption Research, published this year, businesses expect the proportion of their staff using AI to grow from 30 per cent today to 43 per cent within the next two years. Job roles are quietly shifting - not through dramatic announcements, but through the gradual absorption of tasks that AI can now handle.  The key is going to be to bring people into the conversation before the gap becomes harder to close.  

So while marketing continues to integrate the technology, what is stopping other sectors from doing so? It’s certainly not a technology problem. Perhaps, aptly,  it’s  more  a  communications challenge.   

And, like any comms brief, before we can talk about how to bring people with us, we need to  understand and acknowledge why many of them are hesitant - and take those reasons seriously.   

The fears around AI are not irrational. Many people are understandably hesitant – whether that’s a distrust of technology, the feeling of being too old to adopt AI skills, or that they feel AI might not be relevant to them.  

DSIT’s research found that only 43 per cent of UK public servants feel optimistic about AI, and just fifty-four percent of civil servants have received no AI training whatsoever. And yet - this is the number that matters - of those who have been trained, three-quarters find AI easy to use.   

The barrier isn't the technology. It  isn't  even  necessarily the will. It's that the right support, in the right language, for the right people, simply  hasn't  arrived yet.  

As a function that understands audiences,  behaviour change, and positioning better than anyone else in business - that's marketing’s problem to own.  

So how do we fix it?  

The answer, I'd argue, is already sitting in our own professional toolkit. We've just been applying it elsewhere.  

Think about how other effective literacy  programmes work. They don't lead with what the programme wants to deliver. They start from people's existing anxieties and lived experience. They treat scepticism not as an obstacle to overcome but as an important signal about what matters to the audience, and where the real work needs to happen. They build skills incrementally, in ways that feel manageable rather than overwhelming, and they return a sense of agency to the individual rather than asking people to simply trust an institution or technology they may not feel included in.  

That architecture works. And AI adoption - especially in the public sector and among smaller businesses - needs exactly the same approach.  

The people who aren't engaging with AI  aren't  refusing the future. They just haven't been invited into it in a way that feels relevant to their world. They need to see AI working in a business like theirs, spoken about by someone like them, solving a problem they actually recognise. That's peer-to-peer credibility.  That's  behaviour  change. That's  marketing.  

The ask  

Accenture helped put in place the UK's commitment to upskill 10 million workers by 2030 - a genuine signal that the UK is serious about AI leadership. The UK has done this before: the major public information campaigns of the late 90s and early 2000s successfully shifted public perception around going online and learning new skills. If we'reserious about the UK becoming a genuine AI leader, the communications strategy must now match these same ambitions.  

That means treating AI literacy as a public good, in the same way we treat financial literacy or road safety. Not a nice-to-have. Not a bolt-on to a technology programme. A funded, designed, audience-first effort to make AI feel possible for the people most at risk of being left behind by it.  

And it means commissioning that work from people who understand behaviour change, human understanding, and not just the clever people who understand technology(though it helps to involve some of them too).  

Marketing led the AI adoption charge. The credibility we've built by moving first is only worth something if we use it in service of something bigger. AI is the driver of growth, and we have the tools, the insight and the track record to take the tension out of its adoption - and to make sure that nobody gets left behind in the charge.   

Fred Brinton, Associate Planning Director at TMW, part of Accenture Song 

Accenture’s AI report Pulse of Change 2026