TL;DR
Canva’s State of Marketing and AI Report 2026 finds that 97% of marketing leaders use AI daily and 99% plan to increase spending, but 78% of consumers still prefer human-made adverts and 87% say the best advertising requires a human touch. Mentions of “AI slop” have risen ninefold, and consumers want disclosure (52%), data protection (53%), and the ability to opt out (37%). The report was published alongside Canva’s expanded partnership with Anthropic, integrating its design engine into Claude for Small Business.
Nearly every marketer in the world is now using AI to make creative work. Nearly every consumer would still rather that a person had made it. That tension, between the industry’s enthusiasm and the public’s unease, is the central finding of Canva’s State of Marketing and AI report for 2026, and it suggests that the harder problem in AI-assisted marketing is not production. It is permission.
The numbers are stark on both sides. Ninety-seven per cent of marketing leaders surveyed say they use AI in their daily creative work. Ninety-nine per cent plan to increase their AI investment this year. But 78% of consumers say they would rather see adverts made by people, even if AI could produce better ones, and 87% believe the best advertising still requires a human touch. The report, based on surveys of 1,415 marketing leaders at organisations with 500 or more employees and 3,547 consumers across seven countries, captures an industry that has adopted a technology faster than its audience has learned to trust it.
The disclosure question
The trust gap is not abstract. Consumers are increasingly specific about what would close it. When asked what would make them more comfortable with AI in advertising, 53% cited data protection, 52% cited disclosure of AI use, 39% wanted assurances that AI is not replacing jobs, and 37% said they would like the ability to opt out of AI-generated adverts entirely. The demand for transparency is sharpened by a growing awareness that the line between human-made and machine-made content is dissolving: 70% of consumers believe it will eventually be impossible to tell whether an advert was AI-generated without disclosure, and 56% expect that threshold to arrive within two to five years.
The finding reframes a conversation that has, until now, been dominated by capability. Marketing teams have spent the past 18 months asking what AI can do. The report suggests their audiences are asking a different question: whether they were told.
The slop problem
The quality concern has also acquired a name. Mentions of “AI slop,” the colloquial term for low-effort, visibly machine-generated content, have increased ninefold in media monitoring data, according to the report. Forty-one per cent of marketing leaders say it is already a considerable challenge. Seven in ten consumers say AI-generated adverts feel like they are missing something, a response that may reflect not a rejection of AI itself but an instinctive detection of the gap between content that was made and content that was generated.
The paradox is that the same technology driving the slop problem is also the only plausible route to solving it at scale. AI makes it trivially cheap to produce mediocre creative. It also makes it possible to personalise, test, and iterate at speeds that no human team could match. The distinction between the two outcomes is not the technology but the standards applied to it, which is to say, it is a management problem dressed in engineering clothes.
What marketers are actually doing
The report finds that 68% of marketing leaders say AI has led to an increase in marketing-influenced business decisions, suggesting the technology is not merely accelerating production but reshaping how teams allocate resources and measure impact. The investment trajectory is almost vertical: from 94% of marketers investing in AI in the 2025 edition of the same survey to 97% actively using it daily this year, with near-universal plans to spend more.
The timing of the report’s release is not incidental. Canva published it on the same day it announced an expanded partnership with Anthropic, integrating its design engine into Claude for Small Business, a product that allows small business owners to generate on-brand marketing campaigns directly through Claude’s AI assistant. The integration connects to each user’s Canva Brand Kit, so that generated assets automatically use the correct fonts, colours, and visual identity. It is, in effect, the infrastructure for exactly the kind of AI-assisted creative work the report describes, targeted at the millions of small businesses that lack dedicated marketing teams.
The Canva-Anthropic partnership had already seen usage grow fourfold in March 2026 following a January expansion that made Claude the first AI assistant capable of generating on-brand designs through a simple prompt. The new integration extends that capability into a broader suite of business tools including QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, DocuSign, and Google Workspace.
The trust economy
What the Canva report captures, perhaps inadvertently, is the emergence of trust as a competitive variable in marketing, not between brands and consumers (which is old), but between AI-assisted brands and consumers who know the assistance exists (which is new). The 78% of consumers who say they prefer human-made adverts are not necessarily saying AI is bad. They are saying they value the knowledge that a person chose to make something, that creative decisions reflect intention rather than optimisation. Whether that preference survives a generation raised on AI-generated content is an open question. But for now, it represents a constraint that the industry’s adoption curve has outrun.
The marketers who navigate this well will likely be those who treat AI disclosure not as a compliance burden but as a brand signal, a way of saying: we used the tools, and we used them deliberately. The ones who do not will contribute to the ninefold increase in slop, and their audiences will notice, even if they cannot always articulate why.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
