2026 Trends: AI levels the playing field

AI levels the playing field – but lack of in-house expertise could threaten mid-market revolution

In CTI's 2026 marketing and AI trends report, we struck a tone of prudent optimism, but it’s obvious to all why the market has been so incredibly bullish about AI. Use Google’s Nano Banana Pro image generator, to pick just one example, and a certain quote from Arthur C. Clarke comes to mind.

The promise that AI holds for marketers is huge, and the tech could arguably be a democratising force, levelling the playing field for smaller companies short on resources.

Pace and potential

AI-powered features being integrated into martech and SaaS products are growing – both in number and sophistication.

Time-to-insight and barriers to production are falling. Synthetic data and agentic workflows have the potential to tip the scales towards agile and ambitious challenger brands who aren’t laden with technical debt or afraid to kill their darlings.

Shopify’s December ‘25 release serves as a useful yardstick to understand how AI models are being incorporated into SaaS for insight, prediction and content generation. The commerce platform’s virtual assistant Sidekick can now:

• provide store owners with personalised recommendations for optimisation (suggesting your next A/B test or email automation),
• generate custom apps (e.g. ask for one to create discount codes),
• be prompted to make design edits (tell it how to modify a website theme, product photos or email layout).

For those stores short on web traffic, a newly launched Shopify app, SimGym, creates synthetic personas, allowing smaller retailers to simulate shopper behaviour and more confidently test changes.

This is just one prominent example of a platform rapidly releasing new AI-powered features that can help smaller businesses compete.

The martech landscape is vast and it now butts up against agent builders and workflow automation platforms, from big players such as OpenAI to the likes of n8n. Marketers can effectively build their own martech that then integrates with existing SaaS platforms (and their tried and tested data architecture).

Lack of in-house expertise

The question for the mid-market is whether they have the AI skills in place to successfully implement and adopt all this promising tech, or even to get the most out of standalone tools such as ChatGPT.

In a November survey of 1,205 mid-sized businesses by Warc and Mailchimp, nearly all respondents (98%) said AI will improve marketing effectiveness, but only a third said they are using it widely in their organisations. The most common barrier cited was a lack of in-house expertise (by two out of five respondents).

The workforce isn’t lacking enthusiasm – employees are three times more likely to be using gen AI than their leaders expect. But roughly half are still keen on formal training from their organisation.

Bottom-up enthusiasm for experimentation must be met with top-down planning, skills development and governance.

This is an excerpt from CTI Digital's report, 2026 Trends: Marketing in the Age of AI. If you'd like to chat about AI and innovation with our expert team, get in touch.