EMARKETER’s Nate Elliott: AI Advertising Will Hit $32 Billion This Year
Most of the conversation about AI in marketing focuses on chatbots and LLM-powered discovery. The money tells a different story.
“This year in the US, AI advertising will generate more than $32 billion in revenue. That’ll more than double to $68 billion by 2030,” Nate Elliott, principal analyst at EMARKETER, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at EMARKETER’s Future of Digital event in New York. “But the vast majority of that money, both now and in 2030, isn’t going to be advertising inside of chatbot conversations. It’s actually just going to be regular paid listings on search results pages that happen to sit next to things like AI overviews.”
Of this year’s $32 billion, only $5.4 billion flows into advertising inside chatbot conversations — a figure that will start to equalize over time, but even by 2030, paid search listings alongside AI overviews remain the dominant revenue source.
Workflow, not channel
Despite the focus on AI as a consumer-facing channel, EMARKETER’s survey of several hundred marketers found that most AI adoption is happening inside the office, not in front of audiences.
“So many companies are playing with GEO, a handful of companies are experimenting with AI advertising, but by far the most common way marketers and agencies say they’re using these tools is to just do their jobs,” Elliott said. “It’s for audience research, it’s for strategy and planning, for creative, for media planning and buying, and for campaign measurement.”
Analytics undervalued
Campaign measurement has ranked as the number one marketer pain point in Elliott’s surveys for decades — not because it lacks importance, but because it’s unglamorous work that few people entered marketing to do.
“I didn’t get into marketing so that I could count more clicks and that’s kind of what campaign measurement is. I’m actually really excited that AI has given us the capability to do this work without having to actually do this work ourselves,” Elliott said. “It’s undervalued as part of what we do as marketers and the fact that we have tools that can do this for us is just fantastic.”
Test everything
AI chatbots didn’t exist four years ago. AI advertisements didn’t exist two years ago. The platforms themselves don’t know what they’ll look like a year from now — which makes sitting on the sidelines a particularly costly form of caution.
“If you’re not testing everything in AI, then you’re going to have a hard time taking advantage of whatever turns out to be the best opportunity,” Elliott said.
For Elliott, that uncertainty is also what makes covering this moment genuinely exciting — not just as an observer, but as a participant in something still being invented.
“Everyone — the platforms, the marketers, the agencies — everyone is literally making this stuff up as we go along. We get to watch this happen, we get to participate in making this happen, and we get to invent the world that’s unfolding in front of us,” Elliott said.
You’re watching Beet.TV’s coverage of EMARKETER’s 2026 The Future of Digital summit. For more videos from this summit, please visit this page.
Most of the conversation about AI in marketing focuses on chatbots and LLM-powered discovery. The money tells a different story.
“This year in the US, AI advertising will generate more than $32 billion in revenue. That’ll more than double to $68 billion by 2030,” Nate Elliott, principal analyst at EMARKETER, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at EMARKETER’s Future of Digital event in New York. “But the vast majority of that money, both now and in 2030, isn’t going to be advertising inside of chatbot conversations. It’s actually just going to be regular paid listings on search results pages that happen to sit next to things like AI overviews.”
Of this year’s $32 billion, only $5.4 billion flows into advertising inside chatbot conversations — a figure that will start to equalize over time, but even by 2030, paid search listings alongside AI overviews remain the dominant revenue source.
Workflow, not channel
Despite the focus on AI as a consumer-facing channel, EMARKETER’s survey of several hundred marketers found that most AI adoption is happening inside the office, not in front of audiences.
“So many companies are playing with GEO, a handful of companies are experimenting with AI advertising, but by far the most common way marketers and agencies say they’re using these tools is to just do their jobs,” Elliott said. “It’s for audience research, it’s for strategy and planning, for creative, for media planning and buying, and for campaign measurement.”
Analytics undervalued
Campaign measurement has ranked as the number one marketer pain point in Elliott’s surveys for decades — not because it lacks importance, but because it’s unglamorous work that few people entered marketing to do.
“I didn’t get into marketing so that I could count more clicks and that’s kind of what campaign measurement is. I’m actually really excited that AI has given us the capability to do this work without having to actually do this work ourselves,” Elliott said. “It’s undervalued as part of what we do as marketers and the fact that we have tools that can do this for us is just fantastic.”
Test everything
AI chatbots didn’t exist four years ago. AI advertisements didn’t exist two years ago. The platforms themselves don’t know what they’ll look like a year from now — which makes sitting on the sidelines a particularly costly form of caution.
“If you’re not testing everything in AI, then you’re going to have a hard time taking advantage of whatever turns out to be the best opportunity,” Elliott said.
For Elliott, that uncertainty is also what makes covering this moment genuinely exciting — not just as an observer, but as a participant in something still being invented.
“Everyone — the platforms, the marketers, the agencies — everyone is literally making this stuff up as we go along. We get to watch this happen, we get to participate in making this happen, and we get to invent the world that’s unfolding in front of us,” Elliott said.
You’re watching Beet.TV’s coverage of EMARKETER’s 2026 The Future of Digital summit. For more videos from this summit, please visit this page.
