What AI is actually doing in Marketing, in practice
The most established AI platforms lie within paid advertising. AI now handles a great deal of the mechanical work in campaign management, adjusting bids, testing creative combinations and shifting budget toward what is working, continuously and faster than any human could. This is the highest-adoption use of AI in marketing across the region, and it is not really optional anymore, because the platforms themselves are built around it.
Then there is personalisation, from copies, text, formats, audiences and more. There is content production, where AI speeds up the first draft of everything from ad copy to blog posts. There is analysis, where AI can spot patterns in customer behaviour that would take a team weeks to find manually.
And increasingly there is search itself. As customers start asking ChatGPT and Google's AI answers for recommendations rather than scrolling through links, getting your brand mentioned in those answers has become its own discipline. That is one of the more consequential shifts, because it changes how customers find you in the first place.
Why GCC customers are unusually receptive
Personalisation only works if customers are comfortable with it, and Gulf consumers are notably more open than their Western counterparts.
A study by consulting firm Oliver Wyman, discussed by INSEAD Knowledge, found that UAE consumers were consistently more willing to engage with AI tools than people in the United States. 71% of UAE respondents were interested in customised promotional offers, against 56% of US respondents, and 55% were interested in AI-powered customer service chatbots. The reason is not complicated. When people already use AI constantly in their own lives, and the UAE leads the world on that measure, they are not unsettled by a brand using it too. They expect the relevance it brings.
There is a practical dimension too. Gulf audiences are genuinely multilingual, with Arabic and English audiences behaving quite differently from one another, so the ability to serve the right content to the right person in the right language stops being a luxury and becomes basic competence.
The risk nobody wants to mention...
Now the honest part, because this is where the enthusiasm needs tempering.
The same INSEAD discussion raised two problems that deserve more attention than they get. The first is the personalisation paradox. Customers want relevance, but push personalisation too far and it stops feeling helpful and starts feeling intrusive. There is a line, and AI makes it very easy to cross without noticing.
The second is sharper, and it is the one that should worry any brand leaning hard on AI. If every marketer in the market deploys the same AI tools to generate the same kind of personalised content, how does anyone stand out? Experts on that panel called it the sea of sameness. It is the central irony of AI in marketing. The technology that promises differentiation is being used by everyone, in much the same way, which means the output converges. When AI writes everyone's ad copy, everyone's ad copy starts to sound the same.
This is not an argument against using AI. It is an argument against thinking AI is the strategy. The brands that win in a market saturated with AI-generated sameness will be the ones with something genuine to say, a real understanding of their customers, and the cultural fluency to say it in a way that lands in this region specifically. AI is very good at execution. It is not a substitute for having a point of view.
The measurement problem
IBM's research found that while a large majority of leaders report productivity gains from AI, only around a third feel confident they can actually measure the return on their AI investment. Most businesses believe AI is helping but far fewer can show it. That gap is where a lot of marketing budget quietly disappears, and getting an honest read on what is actually working is one of the most valuable things a brand can do right now.
The related finding from the Dubai Future Foundation and IBM is just as pointed. Organisations with mature, well-run AI governance reported far greater productivity impact than those without. The advantage does not come from having the most tools. It comes from being deliberate, which usually means fewer tools used better, clear ownership, and people who genuinely know how to use them.
What does this mean for brands in the GCC?
If you are running marketing for a brand in the Gulf, the practical position is fairly clear. AI is already doing real work in this industry, particularly in paid media, and your customers here are more receptive to it than almost anywhere else in the world. That is a genuine advantage worth using.
But the edge is not going to come from adopting AI, because everyone is doing that. It will come from using it with judgement, staying honest about what is working, and holding on to the human parts that AI cannot do, which are strategy, cultural understanding and having something worth saying. Thoughtful adoption beats fast adoption, and the data backs that up rather than just sounding nice.
An end note from Push
We use AI in our work every day, and we are genuinely enthusiastic about what it does well. We are also wary of the version of this conversation where AI is treated as a magic ingredient rather than a set of tools that need pointing at the right problems. The sea of sameness risk is real, and in a region where so many brands are adopting the same tools at the same pace, the ones that stand out will be the ones that still know what they are actually trying to say.
If you are trying to work out where AI genuinely helps your marketing, and where it is just adding noise and cost, that is exactly the conversation we like having.
Want an honest view of where AI is helping your marketing and where it is not? Get in touch with Push for a straightforward conversation about what is worth doing and what is not.
