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The IAB's State of Data 2026 report landed with a striking headline: AI could unlock $32 billion in media investment and productivity value over the next one to two years. It's a number that should stop every CMO, media planner, and analytics leader in their tracks.
But buried inside that projection is a figure worth examining more closely. When planners were asked how much time they expected AI to free up, the average answer was roughly 10% per quarter — a shift from data preparation toward insight generation and strategy. The IAB frames this as a meaningful win, and across an industry of 434,000 U.S. ad managers, it translates to an estimated $6.2 billion in productivity value.
We don't dispute that math, but we'd challenge the assumption that 10% is the ceiling.
The IAB report is clear on where AI is being used in measurement workflows today: data collection, cleaning, labeling, normalization, and integration. These are the tasks eating the most time, and they're the first place teams reach for AI. That's the right instinct.
The problem is that most teams are reaching for the wrong tools. The report notes that 83% of planning teams rely on general purpose AI tools — solutions that are easy to access but not purpose-built for the complexity of marketing data workflows. When you apply a general purpose tool to a specialized problem, you get general purpose results.
A 10% time savings is what you get when AI is an add-on. It's not what you get when AI is purpose-built for the workflow.
Horizon Media is the largest independent media agency in the United States. Like every agency at their scale, they were sitting on enormous amounts of historical campaign data and facing a familiar bottleneck: audience targeting was a time-intensive, analyst-dependent process that couldn't keep pace with the speed their clients demanded.
When Horizon partnered with Akkio to co-develop a custom AI platform, the results reframed what "time savings" means in this industry.
Audience targeting that previously took hours per campaign is now completed in minutes. That's not a 10% improvement. That's a 150x increase in speed, replicable across their entire client portfolio.
As Elizabeth Twersky, Vice President and Group Director of Data Solutions at Horizon Media, put it: "What once took hours is now accomplished in minutes, freeing our teams to focus on the strategic thinking and creative problem-solving that truly drives client success."
The IAB report focuses heavily on productivity gains and measurement frequency improvements — both real and important. But the Horizon Media story points to something the survey data doesn't fully capture: what happens to your business when you operate at a fundamentally different speed than your competitors.
Horizon's AI-powered capabilities didn't just make their existing work faster. They changed what was possible in new business conversations. The platform's ability to deliver sophisticated, data-driven insights — previously available only to specialized teams — became democratized across the agency. That shift in capability was directly linked to a $800 million deal closure.
That's not a productivity story. That's a growth story.
To be fair to the IAB findings, the report does acknowledge that the 10% figure likely understates the potential. Analytics teams, the report notes, are more cautious in their estimates — citing challenges around scale, organizational readiness, and resistance to change. The report also flags that most teams are still using AI for data "heavy lifting" rather than the higher-impact analytical work that comes next.
This is precisely the gap Akkio is built to close. The report envisions a future where AI supports attribution matching, experiment design, MMM tuning, and scenario planning. Getting there requires moving past general purpose tools toward platforms that are designed for the specific complexity of marketing data — integrating across channels, maintaining data security and governance, and delivering outputs that planning and analytics teams can actually trust and act on.
Horizon Media's 150x came from building something purpose-designed for their workflows, their data ecosystem, and their clients' needs — a custom platform co-developed with Akkio that fit the actual shape of their business.
The IAB report is sounding an alarm that the industry can't afford to ignore. Advanced measurement is falling short. Marketing budgets are tightening. And AI adoption is accelerating faster than the governance and standards needed to support it responsibly.
Waiting for industry-wide standards to materialize is not a strategy. The $32 billion opportunity the IAB identifies will accrue to agencies and brands that are already building — investing in AI infrastructure that is transparent, secure, and purpose-built for marketing data, not repurposed from something designed for a different problem entirely.
A 10% time savings is a starting point. Horizon Media's experience suggests the ceiling is much, much higher.
Interested in what Akkio's platform could mean for your team's measurement workflows? Book a meeting with us to learn more.
Transform your campaign workflows with powerful AI that delivers measurable results.