41% of UK AI marketing deployments examined in our 2026 panel failed outright or materially under-delivered against business case within 12 months.
Six failure modes by share: standalone vendor pilot stranded with no integration (28%), AI capability shipped with no named owner (23%), cold-start data starvation (16%), workflow brittleness at handoff (13%), governance / brand safety incident (11%), business case never validated (9%).
Leader-cohort failure rate is 19% — less than half the panel median. Driven by operating-model discipline: embedded over standalone, named ownership, defined production exit criteria.
Sector failure rates: Financial services 52%, Industrial / manufacturing 49%, Healthcare 47%, Ecommerce 32%.
Published quarterly by Creative Marketing Research with anonymised root-cause categorisation.