How Ready Are Media Teams for Agentic AI?

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Skai surveyed 332 paid media practitioners across retail, media, CPG, tech, and other sectors to find out where agentic readiness actually stands in 2026.

Top Findings

The talk about agents is ahead of the build.
The will is outpacing the capability.
Autonomous agent operations are still mostly theoretical.

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79% of paid media teams score below the Building tier of agentic readiness, with a mean score of 35.7 out of 100.

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Human and Change Readiness scored highest among all nine dimensions at 46.5, while the operational foundations agents rely on trailed by 10 to 20 points.

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Of 332 paid media practitioners surveyed, just one described an organization that has reached the Agentic tier.

Key Takeaways

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Media teams average barely into the Exploring tier. The ambition is real; the build-out isn’t.

Willingness leads, capability lags. Attitude is strong; data, systems, assets, and team design are not.

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Foundations come first, and they cap how far the flashier agent use cases can go.

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Leaders rate their teams as more ready than practitioners do, so reading both gives the truest picture.

A horizontal bar chart with five levels: Unprepared, Exploring, Building, Operational, and Agentic. Progress bars decrease in length from top to bottom, indicating advancement through each level.

How ready are media teams for agentic AI right now?

Not very. The large majority of teams sit below the Building tier, and a fully Agentic operation is vanishingly rare. The chart shows the spread.

Why aren’t media teams ready for agentic AI?

Infrastructure, not attitude. Teams are willing, but the operational layer agents need (data, systems, assets, team design) lags well behind. The dimension chart shows the split.

Bar chart showing mean readiness scores by dimension, with categories such as human & change readiness, data readiness, governance & risk, and others, each represented by horizontal pink bars of varying lengths.

Bar chart titled The Biggest Gaps: Where Most Teams Are Still Pre-Building, showing gaps in areas like use case maturity (76%) and human & change readiness (36%), with percentages decreasing by category.

Where are media teams least ready?

On the dimensions agents need most: use cases, operating model, and creative assets. Most teams are still pre-Building on all three. The full breakdown is in the report.

Which teams are the most ready for agentic AI?

Readiness increases with seniority, and no surveyed industry is above the Building tier yet. The report breaks it down by role and sector.

A comparison bar chart showing data by seniority (C-suite, VP/Head of, Director, Senior Manager, Manager) and by industry (Financial Services & Insurance, Technology/SaaS, etc.) with varying blue bar lengths.

What should marketing teams do next?

Five moves the data points to: build Foundations before Accelerators, name an owner and fund it, connect paid media data to business data, codify senior judgment, and redesign the team around agents. The full report turns these into a prioritized plan via the assessment.

Are you ready? Take the Agentic Survey to see where you stand.

FAQs

Systems that carry out multi-step marketing work on their own, taking action inside set guardrails instead of waiting for a prompt at each step. In paid media, an agent might monitor performance, propose changes, and act on them with human oversight.

Skai scores readiness across nine dimensions and five maturity levels, from Unprepared to Agentic. Five Foundation dimensions cover the data, systems, governance, leadership, and people that agents depend on; four Accelerator dimensions cover assets, knowledge, use cases, and operating model.

332 paid media practitioners completed the survey in spring 2026. Responses were scored on a weighted model (Foundations 60%, Accelerators 40%).

Mostly Retail and eCommerce (35%), Media and Entertainment (14%), and CPG (12%), spanning Manager through C-Suite.

Download the report. It walks through all nine dimensions of the Skai Agentic Readiness Framework, with full cohort scores, breakdowns by seniority and industry, and five priorities the data points to. Use the benchmark to see where your team likely stands.

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Get the full State of Agentic Readiness report

Get the full data across all nine dimensions, breakdowns by seniority and industry, verbatim quotes from actual marketers, and the complete methodology.