Marketing productivity statistics at a glance
| Category | Statistic | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Time | 41% of the workday goes to low-value or repetitive tasks, about two days a week | Slack Workforce Index, January 2024 |
| Time | Knowledge workers are interrupted every two minutes during core hours, 275 times a day | Microsoft Work Trend Index, June 2025 |
| Tools | Marketers use 33% of their martech stack's capabilities, down from 58% in 2020 | Gartner via MarTech, 2023 |
| AI | 86.4% of marketing teams use AI in at least a few areas | HubSpot, 2026 |
| AI | 95% of B2B marketers say their organisation uses AI applications, but only 8% call their use advanced or leading | CMI / MarketingProfs, October 2025 |
| AI | 42% of desk workers use AI at least weekly; executives use it daily at four times the rate of individual contributors | Slack Workforce Index, June 2025 |
| Hours saved | The average marketing team saves 10.7 hours a week with AI, a computed weighted midpoint of HubSpot's bands | HubSpot, 2026 (computed) |
| Hours saved | Generative AI users measured in a national US survey save 5.4% of work hours, about 2.2 hours a week | Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, February 2025 |
| Output | 83.5% of marketers expect to produce more content, and 73.1% report increased workloads | HubSpot, 2026 |
| Budget | Marketing budgets average 7.8% of company revenue in 2026, 18% below the level four years earlier | Gartner CMO Spend Survey, May 2026 |
| Budget | Labour rose to 24.5% of the marketing budget from 21.9%, yet 43% of CMOs expect to cut labour spend | Gartner CMO Spend Survey, 2026 |
| Burnout | 65.3% of marketers felt overwhelmed in the past year, 55.1% emotionally exhausted | Marketing Week, February 2026 |
Where does a marketer's week actually go?
Between 41% and 61% of the working day goes to work that isn't the work: chasing updates, sitting in meetings nobody needed, moving information between tools.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 41% of the workday is spent on tasks workers describe as low value, repetitive, or lacking meaningful contribution to their core job, roughly two full days a week. From 10,281 desk workers in six countries. | Slack Workforce Lab, January 2024 |
| US knowledge workers spend 61% of their time on "work about work" such as status checks and meetings. Asana surveyed more than 13,000 knowledge workers, 2,007 of them in the US. | Asana Anatomy of Work Index, 2021 |
| The same survey put unnecessary meetings at 187 hours a year per worker and duplicated or irrelevant work at 308 hours a year. | Asana, 2021 |
| 92% of US knowledge workers work late, adding an average of 2 hours 42 minutes a week. | Asana, 2021 |
| Workers toggle between applications about 1,200 times a day, spending just under four hours a week reorienting themselves, roughly 9% of time at work. Study of 20 teams, 137 users, at three Fortune 500 companies over up to five weeks. | Harvard Business Review, August 2022 |
Four of these five numbers predate ChatGPT, and they're here because nobody has replaced them with anything better. Slack's 41% is a worker's judgment of task value; Asana's 61% is a time-allocation estimate. That is why they sit 20 points apart, and that gap is the honest error bar on any "marketers waste X% of their day" claim.
How much do meetings, messages and tool sprawl cost?
Meetings and messages arrive faster than they can be processed: 117 emails and 153 chat messages a day, 57% of meetings with no invite, and a martech stack where two thirds goes unused.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| The average worker receives 117 emails a day and 153 Microsoft Teams messages per weekday. | Microsoft Work Trend Index, June 2025 |
| Interruptions during core work hours arrive every two minutes, 275 times a day, from meetings, emails and chats. | Microsoft, 2025 |
| 57% of meetings are called ad hoc with no calendar invite. One in ten is scheduled at the last minute, and PowerPoint edits spike 122% in the final ten minutes before a meeting starts. | Microsoft, 2025 |
| 48% of employees and 52% of leaders say their work feels chaotic and fragmented. One in three says the pace makes it impossible to keep up. Survey of 31,000 workers in 31 markets, February to March 2025, alongside Microsoft 365 telemetry. | Microsoft, 2025 |
| The 2026 martech landscape contains 15,505 products, up just 121 net on 2025's 15,384. 1,488 products were added and 1,367 removed. In 2011 the same graphic held 150. | chiefmartec, May 2026 |
| Marketers use 33% of their martech stack's capabilities, down from 42% the year before and 58% in 2020. | Gartner Marketing Technology Survey via MarTech, 2023 |
| Martech fell to 19.4% of the marketing budget in 2026, a five-year low, from 26.6% in 2021. Even so, 62% of CMOs planned to invest more in it. | Gartner CMO Spend Survey via Chief Marketer, May 2026 |
Scott Brinker's landscape stopped growing this year for the first time since 2011, and the churn underneath is the interesting part: 1,488 products in, 1,367 out. Put that next to the utilisation number and you get the real martech story. Nobody is short of tools. Everybody is short of the time to use them.
How many marketing teams use AI, and how often?
Between 75% and 95% of marketing organisations use AI in 2026 depending on the survey. A sample-weighted average of three puts it at 80%.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 86.4% of marketing teams use AI in at least a few marketing areas. Survey of more than 1,500 global marketers across industries, regions and company sizes. | HubSpot State of Marketing, 2026 |
| 75% of marketers have adopted AI, and 81% would trust AI to respond to customers to help them scale. Survey of 4,450 marketing decision makers, 8 October to 17 November 2025. | Salesforce State of Marketing, 10th edition |
| 95% of B2B marketers say their organisation uses AI-powered applications, and 89% use content creation tools. Only 5% describe their use as advanced and 3% as leading; 48% are still "developing". Survey of 1,015 B2B marketers, 24 June to 14 August 2025. | CMI / MarketingProfs, October 2025 |
| 60% of desk workers use AI and 42% use it at least weekly. Daily use rose 233% since November 2024. Survey of 5,156 desk workers in six countries, 9 April to 1 May 2025. | Slack Workforce Index, June 2025 |
| Daily AI use splits sharply by seniority: 43% of executives, 35% of senior managers, 23% of middle managers and 10% of individual contributors. | Slack, 2025 |
| 29% of desk workers say their company has issued no formal AI guidance, and 50% say AI use isn't explicitly encouraged. | Slack, 2025 |
| Among content marketers, the share not using AI fell from 65% to 5% in 24 months. 10% now generate complete articles with it. Survey of 808 content marketers, August 2025. | Orbit Media, 2025 |
The seniority split is the number I'd take to a leadership meeting. Executives use AI daily at more than four times the rate of the people doing the work, which is backwards for a technology whose gains come from repetition. If your individual contributors aren't in the top bracket, your hours-saved number is a forecast, not a result.
How many hours a week does AI actually save a marketer?
HubSpot's marketers report about 10.7 hours a week saved per team. A nationally representative US survey measured 2.2 hours per week per person who actually uses AI. Those two numbers agree more than they look.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| About a third of marketers say AI saves their team 10 to 14 hours a week, another third say more than 15 hours, and just under a third say 1 to 9 hours. The question asks about the team, not the individual. | HubSpot State of Marketing, 2026 |
| 87% of B2B marketers say AI-assisted content creation improved productivity, 80% report better operational efficiency, 58% better content quality and 39% better content performance. | CMI / MarketingProfs, 2025 |
| Generative AI users save 5.4% of their work hours, which for a 40-hour week is 2.2 hours. Across all workers, including non-users, the saving is 1.4% of hours. | Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, February 2025 |
| Among people who used generative AI in the previous week, 20.5% saved four hours or more, 20.1% saved three hours, 26.4% saved two hours and 33.0% saved an hour or less. | Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 2025 |
| 23% of employed US adults had used generative AI for work at least once in the previous week, and 9% used it every workday. Nationally representative surveys fielded in August and November 2024. | Bick, Blandin and Deming, NBER Working Paper 32966 |
Line the units up before you quote either one. HubSpot's 10.7 hours belongs to a whole team; the Fed's 2.2 hours belongs to one person who used AI that week. Five regular AI users clear about 11 hours on the Fed's arithmetic, which lands on top of HubSpot's self-reported figure, so the two roughly agree. That is a duller story than the one being sold. AI is buying a team about a quarter of a full-time person, not a spare body. My working assumption is two to three hours a week for a marketer who uses AI daily and close to zero for one who uses it monthly.
What is marketing's output, headcount and budget per head doing?
Output expectations rose while budget stayed flat: 83.5% expect to produce more content, budgets sit at 7.8% of revenue, and 43% of CMOs expect to spend less on labour.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 83.5% of marketers expect to produce more content in the year ahead, and 35.7% expect to produce significantly more. | HubSpot, 2026 |
| 73.1% of marketers report increased workloads over the past year: 25.7% significantly, 47.4% moderately. | HubSpot, 2026 |
| 78% of marketers need more personalised content than they can produce, and 75% are turning to AI to close the gap. | Salesforce, 2026 |
| The average blog post took 3 hours 25 minutes to write in 2025, down from a peak of 4 hours 10 minutes in 2022. Only 21% of content marketers report strong results from their blog. | Orbit Media, August 2025 |
| Marketing budgets averaged 7.8% of company revenue in 2026, up from 7.7%, and 18% below the mean allocation four years earlier. Survey of 401 CMOs in North America, the UK and Europe, January to March 2026. | Gartner CMO Spend Survey via Chief Marketer, May 2026 |
| Labour rose to a mean 24.5% of the marketing budget from 21.9% the year before. Only 34% of CMOs expected to spend more on labour, while 43% expected to spend less. | Gartner CMO Spend Survey, 2026 |
| 57% of CMOs say they lack the talent to execute their 2026 strategy and 56% say they lack the budget. | Gartner CMO Spend Survey, 2026 |
| CMOs put a mean 15.3% of the marketing budget into AI, but only 30% report mature or fully developed AI readiness capabilities. Organisations that do allocate 21.3% to AI and hold budgets worth 8.9% of revenue. | Gartner, May 2026 |
| Only 9% of CMOs rate their internal processes as fully optimised to scale AI for productivity. 25% are at an early stage and 7% haven't started. | Gartner CMO Spend Survey, 2026 |
Read the Gartner labour figures together and you get the shape of 2026. Labour's share of budget went up while most CMOs plan to spend less on it, so the same money buys fewer, more expensive people, and only 9% have processes that can scale AI. Whatever productivity gain exists is going on covering an unchanged workload with a smaller team.
Are marketers burning out?
Yes. In the UK, 65.3% of marketers felt overwhelmed in the past year and 55.1% are emotionally exhausted, in a year when average pay fell at every seniority level.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 65.3% of marketers felt overwhelmed over the past 12 months, 60.7% feel undervalued and 55.1% are emotionally exhausted. Survey of 2,350 respondents. | Marketing Week 2026 Career and Salary Survey, February 2026 |
| 42.5% of marketers would not tell their manager or the wider business that they felt undervalued or exhausted. | Marketing Week, 2026 |
| 51.2% have seen a marketing role's remit grow without a matching increase in pay. | Marketing Week, March 2026 |
| 69.4% saw no career progression at all in the past 12 months, and 54.5% see no opportunity for progression in the next year. | Marketing Week, 2026 |
| Average UK senior manager pay fell to £60,577 from £72,434 a year earlier. Executives and assistants fell to £33,815 from £36,106, junior managers to £43,173 from £47,840, and CMOs and directors to £111,082 from £117,623. | Marketing Week, March 2026 |
| Almost nine in ten US knowledge workers experienced burnout in the previous year, and 26% of weekly deadlines were missed. | Asana Anatomy of Work Index, 2021 |
Pay fell at all four seniority levels in a year when 73.1% of marketers reported heavier workloads. If the saved hours were real and output grew, the market would be bidding for marketers, not repricing them. AI made marketing look cheaper to run before it made any team measurably better.
How we calculated the original numbers
Four figures here appear nowhere else. Here's the arithmetic, so you can check it or change the inputs.
- 10.7 hours saved per marketing team per week, about a quarter of a full-time person. HubSpot reports AI hours saved in three roughly equal bands, and the question asks about the respondent's team. Take each band's midpoint and the floor of the open-ended top one, weighted as equal thirds: (5 + 12 + 15) / 3 = 10.7 hours, or 0.27 FTE at a 40-hour week. It's self-reported, 15 is a floor rather than an estimate, and HubSpot publishes no team size, so this cannot be converted into hours per marketer.
- 80% of marketers work somewhere that uses AI, weighted by sample. (86.4 x 1,500 + 75 x 4,450 + 95 x 1,015) / 6,965 = 80.4%, using HubSpot 2026, Salesforce late 2025 and CMI 2025. The three questions differ: HubSpot asks whether your team uses AI in at least a few areas, Salesforce whether the marketer has adopted AI, CMI whether the organisation uses AI applications, and CMI is B2B only. Read it as a centre of gravity, not a measured share.
- 90 working days a year lost to low-value repetitive work. Slack's 41% of the workday, over a 220-day year, is 90.2 days. Asana's broader 61% gives 134. So the honest range is three to six months, depending on how you define the work. Both samples are desk and knowledge workers rather than marketers, so this is the ambient rate.
- 0.78% of company revenue spent on marketing payroll that produces nothing. Gartner puts marketing at 7.8% of revenue and labour at 24.5% of the marketing budget, so marketing payroll is 1.91% of revenue. Apply Slack's 41% and you get 0.78%, about $7.8 million at a company with $1 billion in sales. It stitches two populations together and assumes a low-value hour costs the same as a good one, so treat it as sizing, not measurement.
What the 2026 numbers actually say
The busywork number has barely moved in five years. Slack's 41%, Asana's 61%, the four hours a week lost to app toggling: no post-2024 study has shown the share falling. Tool count went from 150 to 15,505 while stack utilisation went from 58% to 33%. Adding software to a coordination problem has a 15-year record of not working.
The hours-saved number is a team number, and it is smaller than it sounds. HubSpot's marketers report 10.7 hours a week for a whole team; the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis measured 2.2 hours for one AI user. Match the units and the two roughly agree, so the going rate is a couple of hours per person per week, not a day back. Whether you get even that depends on your individual contributors using AI daily, and only 10% do.
Nobody is banking the gain. Workloads rose for 73.1% of marketers, output expectations for 83.5%, budgets held at 7.8% of revenue and UK salaries fell at every level. The hours AI gives back are being absorbed by more work at the same headcount. The teams that look different in 2027 will be the ones that decide in advance what those hours are for.
FAQ
How many hours a week does AI save marketers?
About a third of marketers say AI saves their team 10 to 14 hours a week and another third say more than 15, according to HubSpot's 2026 State of Marketing survey of over 1,500 marketers. Weighting those bands gives about 10.7 hours per team, not per person. A nationally representative US survey published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in February 2025 measured 5.4% of work hours, about 2.2 hours a week, for each person who actually uses generative AI.
What percentage of marketers use AI?
About 80% of marketers work somewhere that uses AI, a sample-weighted average of three surveys covering 6,965 respondents: HubSpot's 86.4% (2026), Salesforce's 75% (4,450 marketers, late 2025) and CMI's 95% of B2B marketers (October 2025). The three surveys word the question differently, so treat 80% as a centre of gravity rather than a measured share.
How much time do marketers waste on repetitive tasks?
41% of the workday goes to low-value or repetitive tasks, about two days a week, according to Slack's Workforce Index survey of 10,281 desk workers in January 2024. Over a 220-day year that's 90 working days per person.
How many meetings and messages does a knowledge worker handle?
The average worker receives 117 emails and 153 Teams messages a day and is interrupted 275 times, once every two minutes during core hours, according to Microsoft's Work Trend Index (June 2025). 57% of meetings are called ad hoc with no calendar invite.
How much of a marketing budget goes to people?
Labour takes a mean 24.5% of the marketing budget in 2026, up from 21.9%, in Gartner's CMO Spend Survey of 401 CMOs. With marketing budgets at 7.8% of company revenue, marketing payroll is about 1.9% of revenue.
Are marketers more burned out in 2026?
65.3% of marketers felt overwhelmed in the past 12 months and 55.1% are emotionally exhausted, according to Marketing Week's 2026 Career and Salary Survey of 2,350 respondents. Average pay fell at all four seniority levels in the same year.
Sources
- HubSpot, 2026 State of Marketing: data from 1,500+ global marketers (2026)
- Salesforce, State of Marketing Report, 10th edition (survey fielded October to November 2025)
- Content Marketing Institute / MarketingProfs, B2B Content and Marketing Trends 2026 (October 2025)
- Slack Workforce Index, The New AI Advantage (June 2025)
- Slack Workforce Lab, accelerating AI use at work (February 2024)
- Microsoft WorkLab, Work Trend Index: Breaking Down the Infinite Workday (June 2025)
- Gartner, 2026 CMO Spend Survey press release (May 2026)
- Chief Marketer, Gartner CMO Spend Survey coverage (May 2026)
- Sword and the Script, Gartner CMO spend survey analysis (June 2026)
- MarTech, Marketers are only using one third of their stack's capability (2023, reporting the Gartner Marketing Technology Survey)
- chiefmartec, 2026 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (May 2026)
- Asana, Anatomy of Work Index 2021: US findings (2021)
- Harvard Business Review, How Much Time and Energy Do We Waste Toggling Between Applications? (August 2022)
- Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, The Impact of Generative AI on Work Productivity (February 2025)
- Bick, Blandin and Deming, The Rapid Adoption of Generative AI, NBER Working Paper 32966 (September 2024)
- Orbit Media, Blogging Statistics and Trends (August 2025)
- Marketing Week, Are marketers at breaking point? (February 2026)
- Marketing Week, Average marketing salaries dip in 2026 (March 2026)
Methodology. Numbers were collected in September 2026, checked against the original publisher's page rather than other statistics roundups, and then re-checked line by line by a second reviewer. Vendor claims without a stated sample or method were excluded. Gartner and Harvard Business Review block automated access, so those figures were confirmed through the publisher's own headline plus two independent reports of the same research. Numbers older than 24 months are labelled with their year in the text: the Slack 41%, the Asana studies, the HBR toggling study and Gartner's martech utilisation figure. Where two credible sources disagree, as with self-reported and measured AI time savings, both are shown with their method and their unit. Last updated 8 September 2026.