Many companies have now moved past "Should we adopt AI?" and straight into what is a much harder question to answer: "Where does AI make the most sense—and where do humans still create irreplaceable value?"

The 2026 Marketing Talent AI Impact Report—from the Marketing AI Industry Council, an industry body created and chaired by Marketing AI Institute by SmarterX—attempts to answer this question. Designed to capture what senior leaders are actually seeing, the report found that work is actually moving upstream, from producing outputs to exercising judgment.

The report calls it the “human edge," which is a hierarchy of where humans still create leverage: strategic and critical thinking; emotional intelligence and trust-building; creativity and storytelling; curiosity and experimentation; and the ability to align others around a direction. In other words: AI can generate, but humans still have to decide what matters, what’s true, what’s ethical, and what will actually move the business forward.

One way to think about this is that rather than splitting work into “AI tasks” and “human tasks,” you could consider splitting it by the cost of being wrong. Use AI where speed matters and mistakes are cheap. Keep humans accountable where context, reputation, strategy, and trust are on the line. The real issue in the AI era isn’t that models make errors. It’s that organizations stop noticing them.

Finally, one of the most practical recommendations of the report is one that I've touted often: use AI as a sparring partner for judgment. Pair that with cross-department learning, prompt libraries, and custom learning journeys, and you'll be well on your way to better decision making across the entire company.

AI will keep making more possible. The differentiator is whether your organization can choose well enough to turn that possibility into advantage.