Switzerland’s Marketers Have Stopped Asking Whether to Use AI

The debate over artificial intelligence in Swiss marketing departments is over. Of 114 marketing professionals surveyed across German-speaking Switzerland between May 15 and June 11, only one reported not using AI tools at all. The remaining 99% have, in one form or another, folded generative AI into their daily work. The real story, though, is not adoption — it is what comes after.

The numbers behind the shift

The survey, conducted by Liechti & Co GmbH of Zurich among marketing leaders, specialists, and freelancers, found that AI use is now near-universal: 74% describe themselves as regular users, embedding the tools into daily workflows, while 14% have gone further, building their own automations. Text generation leads use cases at 92%, followed by strategy and concept work (80%) and image generation (71%). Data analysis and reporting sit lower at 55%, and campaign automation trails at just 19%.

That gap matters. When asked where they see the greatest untapped potential, respondents pointed overwhelmingly to the very areas where usage remains thin: data analysis and reporting (71%) and campaign automation (67%). Marketers, in other words, have mastered the easy wins — drafting copy, sketching concepts — while the harder, more structurally embedded applications remain aspirational.

The mid-sized paradox

Perhaps the most striking finding concerns company size. Firms with 50 to 249 employees — Switzerland’s broad mid-market — report the highest security concerns (65%) and data protection concerns (53%) of any size bracket, yet also the lowest adoption of campaign automation (6%). Large enterprises, despite investing far more heavily in paid tools (92%) and training (81%), show no corresponding edge in advanced usage: only 10% of their staff qualify as advanced users, barely ahead of firms a tenth their size.

The implication is uncomfortable for corporate IT departments: money spent on licences and workshops does not automatically translate into sophisticated use. One respondent, a marketing lead at a mid-sized firm, put it bluntly: compliance and security teams would need to actively enable connectors and integrations, not merely tolerate them.

Training once is not training

The survey’s most actionable finding may be this: employees who received a single one-off training session report the weakest results of any group. Only 13% of once-trained staff credit AI with quality improvements, and none report cost savings — figures dramatically below those who train continuously or taught themselves. Self-directed learners, by contrast, report the strongest across-the-board gains, including a 64% rate of freeing up time for strategic work.

The pattern suggests that Swiss firms have solved the access problem — tools are available, budgets exist — while neglecting the habit-formation problem. A single workshop appears to function less as a skill upgrade than as a box ticked.

What holds people back

Security and data-protection worries (43% and 39%) now outrank both a lack of know-how (31%) and budget constraints (12%) as the leading barriers to broader use. A quarter of respondents report no meaningful obstacles at all — while others describe internal tools cut off from the open internet, or leadership pulling AI-generated campaigns after public backlash over image generation. The barrier, increasingly, is not technical capability but institutional nerve.

The takeaway

Switzerland’s marketing industry has cleared the adoption hurdle that occupied much of the past two years. What remains is a governance and depth problem: how to move beyond scattered, individual use of AI for drafting and brainstorming toward integrated, trusted systems for automation and analysis — without inviting the compliance backlash that mid-sized firms, in particular, seem to fear. As one survey respondent noted, efficiency gains are unbeatable, but AI still replaces neither good ideas nor good execution.

The survey polled 114 marketing professionals in German-speaking Switzerland and reflects a sentiment snapshot of participants, not a representative picture of the Swiss marketing industry as a whole.

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