AI is no longer sitting in a separate experimental corner of advertising budgets. From deciding how much to bid for an impression and which consumer to target, to generating creative variations and predicting conversions, AI is increasingly sitting underneath the digital advertising machinery itself. This Storyboard18 feature explores a significant shift in how marketing money is actually being spent, with Ajay Varma, Managing Partner at 0101.Today, estimating that 35 to 40% of a large, digitally mature brand’s digital budget is already AI-linked today, up from just 10 to 20% a year ago. By FY27, he expects that figure to reach 65 to 75%. Crucially, the piece argues that most of this is not a new AI budget but a rewriting of existing media and performance marketing spend, with AI quietly determining how that money gets deployed. The real dividing line, Varma notes, is not the sector a brand operates in but whether the CMO is willing to let machines make decisions rather than merely use AI to make presentations faster. For agencies, the reckoning is already underway: the first thing AI kills is billable manual effort, not the agency itself.
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