Is Your Media Team Among the 21% That Have Moved Beyond Experimenting With AI?

White text on a light gray background reads: The State of Agentic Readiness in Media Teams.

Skai surveyed 332 practitioners and leaders across 9 dimensions and 5 maturity levels to measure where paid media teams actually stand on agentic AI — and what’s holding them back.

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Top Findings

79% of teams score below the Building tier
Most media orgs are still exploring agentic AI, not ready to run it.
A booklet titled The State of Agentic Readiness in Media Teams lies on a desk with glasses, a pen, a notebook, and a potted plant nearby.
Humans are the most ready part of the org
People are more prepared for agentic AI than the systems and processes meant to support them.
A woman stands at a glass wall covered with colorful sticky notes and charts, writing or organizing notes, while two people work at laptops in the foreground with coffee cups nearby.
Operating Model & Asset Readiness are the weakest dimensions.
Teams don’t yet have the structure or content assets that agentic workflows require.
Dark gradient background with text: Mean Readiness Score by Dimension. A list shows: 5. Leadership, 6. Systems (both faded), 7. Asset Readiness, 8. Operating Model (both highlighted in pink). Abstract shapes overlay the design.
Leaders score ~10 points higher than practitioners.
The people setting agentic strategy may be overestimating how ready their teams actually are.
Agentic readiness score: 48/100, in Building stage. Progress bar shows stages from Unprepared to Agentic. Radar chart displays metrics: Human, Data, Systems, Governance, Leadership, Assets, Knowledge, Op model, Cases.

Key Takeaways

Simple illustration of a white rocket with a blue flame at the bottom, shown on a light gray background.

Readiness is uneven: most teams are exploring agentic AI in theory; few are close to running it in practice.

A simplified illustration of a webpage window with a blue header containing three squares, and a large gray gear icon in the center, representing website settings or configuration.

Foundations lag furthest behind, particularly the operating model and creative/data assets agentic workflows depend on.

Artificial Intelligence icon in white

Willingness isn’t the bottleneck. People are ahead of the systems built around them.

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Leadership’s view of readiness is rosy. What practitioners report day to day tells a more accurate story.

Bar chart showing five levels: Unprepared 30%, Exploring 49%, Building 18%, Operational 3%, Agentic 0%. The Exploring level has the highest percentage, followed by Unprepared.

How ready are media teams for agentic AI right now?

Not very, by and large. The majority of teams score below the Building tier of Skai’s Agentic Readiness Framework, which is where teams move beyond experimentation. Very few report a fully agentic operation.

Why aren’t media teams ready for agentic AI?

Because the execution hasn’t caught up to the enthusiasm. Of the nine readiness dimensions Skai measures, Operating Model (26.5) and Asset Readiness (30.0) score lowest — well behind Human and Change Readiness, where teams are strongest.

Bar chart showing mean readiness scores by dimension; scores range from 24.8 for use case maturity to 46.5 for human and change readiness. Each dimension has a pink horizontal bar representing its score.
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 agentic workflows depend on most: how work gets structured (Operating Model) and the assets that fuel it (Asset Readiness). Both sit well below the Building tier for most organizations. The full breakdown is in the report.

Which teams are the most ready for agentic AI?

Leaders, by their own estimate. Leadership scores run about 10 points higher than practitioner scores on the same benchmark — a divide between strategy and day-to-day reality. The report breaks this down further by seniority and industry.

Bar charts compare average values by seniority (C-suite highest at 41.7) and by industry (Financial Services & Insurance highest at 47.8), with values labeled for each category.

What should marketing teams do next?

Build the foundations before chasing the flashier use cases: shore up the operating model and asset readiness that agentic workflows actually require, and close the gap between leadership’s view of readiness and what practitioners experience day to day. The full report turns this into a prioritized set of next steps — or take the assessment to see where your own team stands.

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

Take the Survey

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 9 dimensions and 5 maturity levels, from Unprepared to Agentic. The dimensions span the data, systems, governance, leadership, and people that agentic work depends on, plus the assets, knowledge, use cases, and operating model that accelerate it.

332 paid media practitioners and leaders completed the survey in 2026.

Download the full report for complete dimension-by-dimension scores, or take the 3-minute self-assessment for a benchmark specific to your team.
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Get the full State of Agentic Readiness report

What’s inside:

The 9 dimensions of agentic readiness
The 5 maturity levels explained, from Unprepared to Agentic
What “ready” actually looks like at each stage
How your organization is likely to compare
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