Eighty-three percent of ad executives now use AI in the creative process (IAB/Sonata, 2026). Meanwhile, four in five U.S. adults do not trust AI-generated ads or products (Iris Flex, 2025-26). That gap isn't a creative problem. It's a proximity problem — and most brands are flying blind into it.
Proximity is the distance between where your audience actually is with AI and where your strategy assumes they are. Overestimate it by one campaign and you don't just miss — you erode trust that took years to build. The data backs this up: in our national AI Gap Study, only 18% agreed that AI-generated advertising is reliable. Alas, that number is not moving fast enough to keep pace with the speed in which brands are deploying AI.
Every marketer who has rolled with age and gender targeting knows it’s not a precise engagement tactic. A high-earning 32-year-old executive can be more AI-resistant than someone earning half as much and slightly older. Age, income, and education tell you who someone is. They don't tell you how far that person will let AI into their decisions — and that distinction is exactly where AI-related campaigns and initiatives go wrong.
The AI Proximity Framework (APX) surfaces this gap before brands and agencies move forward with AI. It measures four dimensions: Exposure (how much someone has encountered AI in daily life), Comfort (whether they lean in or pull back when AI is present), Delegation (how much they'll let AI influence actual decisions), and Context Breadth (in which categories they accept AI). Each respondent receives a composite score from 0 to 100. The scores reveal eight consumer archetypes — including Power Users, Contextual Adopters, and Skeptical Experimenters — each defined by how far they’ll let AI into their decisions. This gives marketers something demographics never could: a behavioral map of where AI will help, where it will hurt, and where it will backfire.
The most important finding from our 2026 benchmark study among U.S. adults is the wide gap between Exposure and Delegation scores. Thirty points separate what people have encountered with AI from what they will actually act on. Audiences are touching AI every day, one way or another. Trusting it enough to let it influence a purchase decision is a taller ask. Most brand AI strategies are built on the surface-level adoption numbers while audiences’ hesitance to delegate decisions to AI signals how far we are from taking off with AI.
The segments tell you what to do with this – and you do not have to give up on your audiences. You may need to adjust your marketing and communications tactics: Power Users and Fluid Integrators — your high-proximity consumers — want AI-first experiences. They co-build with AI, they delegate readily, and they'll reward you for meeting them there. Skeptical Experimenters are curious but comfort hasn't translated to usage yet — they need transparency and a visible human override. Avoiders need you to protect the relationship. Deploying AI-driven personalization at an Avoider is not a neutral act. It signals that you don't know them and disrupts their buying journey.
Context matters just as much as the score. A confident delegator in one context is not a confident delegator in all contexts. For instance, the same person who fully delegates to AI at work may be an Avoider when the category touches their children or their health. Our data shows that only 11% of U.S. adults are comfortable with AI giving care to children or the elderly. Seventeen percent are comfortable with AI educating their children. These numbers can remain regardless of how tech-forward the individual is in other domains. To avoid hitting the same walls with their AI strategies, brands should not treat proximity as a fixed trait, rather a context-dependent signal.
Brands who get the full audience picture can seize AI‑based marketing opportunities. High‑proximity audiences — such as smart home and wearable device users who already rely on AI for shopping — are primed for deeper engagement.
There are missed opportunities in the categories where audiences are ready but brands haven’t yet made the move. Financial services, health insurance, streaming, and children’s products all have high consumer proximity but low AI‑assisted shopping rates. Perhaps consumers can’t find the right content on AI engines, or they prefer a different balance of human‑AI interaction depending on context. It behooves marketers to find out.
The brands that will win aren't the ones deploying AI fastest. They're the ones who know exactly how far their audiences will let AI in — and meet them there. Proximity isn't a soft metric. It's the insight your marketing performance has been trying to tell you about.
Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.
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The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.org/MyersBizNet.