Marketers adopted AI, consumers didn't. Canva report on the trust gap

Canva has released a new report on marketing and artificial intelligence, which revealed a deep and growing contradiction between what marketers are doing and what consumers want. Marketing in 2026 has become divided into two parts: one completely enamored with AI and seeing it as the future of the industry, while the other part — the consumer audience — distrusts it and would prefer to work with people.

What the Report Found

The State of Marketing and AI 2026 study was one of the largest projects in Canva's history. Analysts surveyed marketers and consumers across different countries and time zones, gathering data from five continents. The results were sharper and more contrasting than the company had expected.

On one hand, marketers have fully switched to AI tools to accelerate and scale their work. They use neural networks for everything: from generating ideas to final visual processing. On the other hand, consumers are actively resisting this trend. The paradox is that the more marketers automate their processes, the less consumers trust them.

• 97% of marketers use AI daily to create various types of content (images, texts, videos, designs, layouts, compositions)
• 78% of consumers openly stated they want marketing content created by people, not robots and algorithms
• A 19 percentage point gap — this is the largest gap in the history of Canva's marketing research

Why Consumers Are Skeptical of AI-Generated Content

Consumer distrust is caused not by the technology itself, but by a sense of "artificiality" and lack of personal attention to them. People intuitively feel the difference between content created by a real designer or copywriter, and text or images automatically generated by a neural network. This is not a fantastical fear of robotization, but a practical and well-founded disappointment over the loss of human touch in brand communication.

There is also a technical layer to this problem. AI-generated content often contains subtle errors: awkward metaphors, odd turns of phrase, logical gaps, and semantic oddities that the machine doesn't notice but the human brain catches immediately. When a consumer spots such an error, they lose trust in the entire brand. A single mistake in AI text or design is perceived as carelessness and inattention to the audience.

"Marketers see AI as a tool for acceleration and scaling.

Consumers see it as a refusal to pay attention to their experience and needs."

The Trap for Marketers in 2026

Marketers have found themselves in a difficult situation with no easy way out. If they abandon AI, they will fall behind competitors in speed, lose productivity and resources, and spend more time on routine work. If they use AI completely and uncritically, they risk alienating their audience and losing their trust. Canva's research showed that many major brands have already faced this dilemma in practice and are seeking a solution.

The solution appears to be a hybrid approach: AI for drafts, quick idea generation, and prototyping, but final refinement, editing, and quality control should be done by humans. It is precisely this type of content — half-made by machine, finished by experienced professionals' hands — that consumers perceive best and consider more honest and higher quality.

What This Means for Marketing

The trend in 2026 is not the complete automation of marketing, but rather finding the right balance between speed and quality. Brands that openly and honestly use AI lose trust if the resulting content looks awkward or contains errors. Those same brands that hide their use of AI and later reveal errors lose even more trust. The only honest way out is to be more transparent and bolder in your choices. Show where automation works and where human expertise and manual work come into play.