Australian marketers fear AI is getting their brands wrong

Australian marketers are increasingly worried about how AI systems represent their brands, but new Contentful research suggests many aren't measuring it.

The research found 40% of Australian marketing leaders nominate inaccurate representation by AI systems as their biggest concern, almost double the 22% recorded among marketers in the UK.

Yet just 72% of Australian respondents have measured how AI systems describe their brand at least once, compared with 92% in the US.

The findings point to a rapidly emerging challenge for marketers as consumers increasingly use AI tools to discover, compare and choose products and services.

Across the study, 91% of marketing leaders agreed the future of marketing increasingly depends on persuading the systems that influence consumers, while 83% ranked accurate representation in AI systems as a top or high priority for the year ahead.

More than half, 55%, already track how AI tools describe, summarise or recommend their brands.

Contentful senior director, solution engineering, EMEA and ANZ Charlie Bell said the shift means marketers need to think beyond how their brand appears directly to consumers.

“For Australian marketers, the question today should be how well-positioned the brand is to be understood, verified and recommended by the systems now standing between us and our customers,” Bell said.

The research also found 85% of marketing leaders believe AI-generated summaries risk making brands sound increasingly alike, while 95% expect brands with strong, well-defined identities to pull further ahead.

AI agents are already operating across an average 3.6 marketing functions per organisation, although governance varies considerably. Some 43% of teams allow agents to act across most tasks with periodic review, while 34% restrict them to low-stakes decisions and 21% require human approval before any action.

There are also implications for the marketing talent pipeline. A quarter of organisations surveyed have reduced or paused entry-level hiring because of AI.

“For Australian brands, closing the measurement gap is the first step — our data suggests they may be flying comparatively blind on AI representation at the exact moment they're most worried about getting it wrong,” Bell said.

Contentful's research, conducted with Atlantic Insights, surveyed 350 marketing decision-makers across Australia, the US and UK.