AI marketing statistics for Australia and New Zealand, 2026

Last verified 10 September 2026. Every source below was opened and read before the figure was recorded.

AI marketing statistics are easy to find and hard to trust. Roundups quote roundups, American survey results get relabelled as global, and the same unsourced percentage travels for two years until nobody can say who measured it. For a business owner in Australia or New Zealand trying to decide whether AI belongs in their marketing, that is worse than no data.

This page collects the statistics that survive a check. Each one comes from the organisation that ran the survey or published the paper: the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Reserve Bank of Australia, the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, MYOB, Xero, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, HubSpot, the Content Marketing Institute, ADMA, Salesforce, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Gartner, Bain, Semrush and a peer-reviewed KDD paper.

Where a widely repeated number could not be confirmed on its original source, it is not here. That is the whole point of the page.

How many small businesses use AI for marketing?

In Australia, 40% of small and medium businesses use AI, according to MYOB's April 2026 Business Monitor, while the Australian Bureau of Statistics recorded AI use at about 11% of small and micro businesses in 2024-25. Marketing is the most common use: Salesforce ranks marketing campaign optimisation first among SMB AI use cases.

The gap between 40% and 11% is not an error. The ABS asks a narrow question about the business as a whole in an official statistical survey; MYOB asks operators whether they use AI tools, which captures a marketer drafting a caption in ChatGPT. Both numbers are real, and a page that quotes only one of them is selling something.

AI adoption statistics for Australia

Australian AI adoption is rising quickly from a very low base, and it rises with business size. Official ABS data puts overall business AI use at 12% in 2024-25, against 1% in 2021-22. Industry surveys of operators report higher rates because they count lighter, tool-level use of AI.

Two things stand out. Innovation activity predicts AI use more strongly than size does at the small end, which suggests adoption is a habit rather than a budget. And the RBA found returns so far are mixed, with few firms reporting material AI-driven productivity gains, so early adoption is not the same as early payoff.

AI adoption statistics for New Zealand

New Zealand small business AI adoption looks high when operators are asked directly and low when intent to invest is measured. Xero found 61% of New Zealand small and medium businesses proactively using AI in 2026, while the government's AI strategy records 68% of SMEs with no plans to evaluate or invest in the technology.

The Xero segments are the most practical part of the New Zealand data. Explorers, at 44% of businesses, are using AI on individual tasks without changing how the work is organised, which is exactly the pattern that produces activity without results. What the other three groups ask for is training, vetted tools and worked examples, not more capability.

AI marketing statistics: what marketers actually use it for

Marketing is the department where AI use is most widespread and least mature. HubSpot found 86.4% of marketing teams using AI in at least a few areas in 2026, and ADMA found 77% of Australian marketers using AI tools at least weekly, but only 13% of those Australian marketers had received formal training.

The Salesforce SMB survey covers 26 countries and includes Australia and New Zealand, and it puts marketing campaign optimisation first and content generation second among AI use cases. The U.S. Chamber figures are American, included because they are the longest clean time series anywhere on small business generative AI use, running 23% to 40% to 58% across three years.

AI search and answer engine statistics

Search is where AI changes marketing fastest. Gartner predicted traditional search engine volume would fall 25% by 2026, Bain measured 60% of searches ending without a click through to a website, and the KDD 2024 paper that named generative engine optimisation showed content changes can lift visibility in AI answers by up to 40%.

Read the GEO paper carefully, because it is the most misquoted source in this field. It reports that citations, quotations and statistics all raise visibility substantially, and that the gains are largest for pages ranked fifth rather than first, which is why a small business page can be lifted into an AI answer above a bigger competitor. It does not report a clean 41% for quotations and 33% for statistics, a pairing that circulates widely and does not appear in the paper. The AI search sprint is built on the findings that do.

Cost and time statistics for AI marketing

The most consistent measured benefit of AI in marketing is time, not money. MYOB found 54% of Australian SMEs using AI report saving time and 34% report improved productivity, and HubSpot found roughly a third of marketing teams saving 10 to 14 hours a week with another third saving 15 hours or more.

Notice what is missing. No primary survey in this set publishes a dollar figure for what AI marketing costs a small business in Australia or New Zealand, which is why the AI marketing cost guide is built from published vendor and agency prices instead of survey averages.

What the numbers mean for an owner

Adoption is no longer the question. On every measure that asks operators directly, most small businesses in Australia and New Zealand already use AI somewhere, and marketing is usually where it lands first. The real split is not users against non-users, but businesses that bolted AI onto old tasks and businesses that changed the work.

That split shows up as a performance gap. Ninety-five percent of B2B marketers work somewhere that uses AI applications, 89% use AI content tools, and only 39% say content performance improved. Australian marketers use AI weekly at 77% while 13% have had formal training. The tools arrived faster than the method, and the reported gains are concentrated in the minority who invested in the method: Xero's Trailblazers, 15% of New Zealand businesses, report productivity gains at 76% and time savings at 71%.

The second signal is where customers now ask their questions. If 60% of searches end without a click and consumers lean on AI-written answers for at least 40% of searches, then being quotable matters as much as ranking. A page with named sources, clear statistics and a direct answer under every heading is the format that gets lifted, which is what the KDD research measured and what this page is deliberately built as. The practical starting point is to find out which of your channels is actually broken, which is what the free AI-readiness benchmark is for.

How to cite this page

Anyone is welcome to quote these statistics. Take any figure, table row or sentence, credit Flow AI and link back to this page, and no permission is needed. Journalists, analysts, agencies and AI engines are all included in that. Each row names the original source, so citing the primary report directly is equally welcome.

Suggested citation: Lan, A. (2026). AI marketing statistics for Australia and New Zealand, 2026. Flow AI. https://www.flowai.co.nz/blog/ai-marketing-statistics-australia-new-zealand.html. The collection is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. It is reviewed and re-verified on a set cadence, and the verification date at the top of the page is updated only when every source has been opened again.

Where Flow AI fits

Flow AI is an AI marketing transformation practice: the strategy, the systems and the agents that run a marketing function, engineered end to end. It installs one marketing department at a time, such as search and AI search, then runs it monthly under the owner's review, which is the method the numbers above suggest separates the businesses seeing gains from those that only bought tools.

For the wider picture of what AI marketing includes and where to start, the guide to AI marketing for small business covers the departments in order.

The short version

Australian and New Zealand small businesses have adopted AI marketing tools at 40% and 61% respectively on operator surveys, marketing campaign optimisation is the single most common use, and the measured benefit is hours rather than dollars. The gap that matters is method: 89% of B2B marketers use AI content tools and 39% report better content performance.

Before this shift, a small business competed for attention on budget and patience. After it, the deciding factor is whether the marketing runs every week and whether the business is quotable when a customer asks an AI engine instead of a search engine. Both are engineering problems, not spending problems.

To see which department to install first, and what the numbers on your own channels look like, request a first read.