A Year of Practicality Will Increase Adoption and Reduce AI Content Waste

It has been three years since generative AI began creating content. The results (so far): high investment with limited adoption and questionable business results. According to Forrester’s State of AI Survey, 2025, three quarters of AI decision-makers across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific say their enterprise has invested more than $300,000 in genAI to date. Furthermore, across all three regions AI decision-makers cite data privacy and security as a consistent barrier to adoption within their organizations. Among North American AI leaders, governance and risk is the second most cited barrier to adoption.

In the next year, digital content will continue to be shaped by enterprises investing but also finally looking to gain practical business value from generative AI solutions. Forrester’s analysts hypothesize that ephemeral content strategies, enterprises architecting agentic AI, and content authenticity initiatives will begin to take center stage to move the needle on adoption. Here’s how we foresee digital content evolving:

  • Prompt language will shape B2B personalization. The traditional manual processes to create, personalize, and stockpile complete content assets become obsolete as buyers increasingly use genAI to find and synthesize information. Relevant real-time personalization requires modularized content and creative elements that frontline marketers and machines can assemble on the fly using myriad combinations of structured and unstructured data, delivery mechanism attributes, program rules, audience context, and new buying signals generated as content is consumed. B2B marketers will shift from static content to writing and sharing prompts that generate personalized experiences at the moment of need, combining interest signals with historical consumer data and enterprise knowledge to deliver meaningfully personalized experiences. – Jessie Johnson
  • Content engines enter a new phase of evolution. Just over half of marketers cite inefficient content creation and reviews, as well as misalignment between sales and marketing, as their biggest content operations challengers, per Forrester’s State of B2B Content Survey, 2024. As workflows modernize and automation expands, these pain points will ease, cutting content creation inefficiency and production bottlenecks in half. The next frontier will be measuring content value: linking visibility, engagement, and brand presence in AI-generated results to business outcomes. The hard part will shift from creation and production to proof, as content engines evolve from chasing efficiency to demonstrating authority and impact. – Lisa Gately
  • Content technology vendors roll back some AI agent plans. Vendor roadmaps for 2026 are packed with AI agents that promise benefits across the content lifecycle. While customers are interested in the value that AI can bring to their businesses, they’re slow to adopt AI agents because they’re overwhelmed with the sheer volume of unproven features, or internal governance requirements that preclude them from turning on AI capabilities. Those challenges may be temporary, but there’s another obstacle for vendors that is likely longer lived: many enterprise customers are increasingly opting to build their own agentic frameworks and AI agents rather than rely on vendor-provided solutions. Vendors will re-evaluate roadmaps and will focus more R&D on frameworks that cater to a “bring your own AI” approach, including the necessary customization to make this work in competitive pricing models.  – Phyllis Davidson
  • Organizations rethink content teams as content operations hubs. As the initial excitement of genAI-powered content creation fades, organizations will face the challenges of managing overwhelming volumes of content that lack cohesion, consistency, and strategic alignment. They’ll notice generic brand voice, LLMs struggling in multilingual contexts, and temporary genAI content that complicates actionable insights. A new generation of content operations leaders will emerge to adapt workflows and content strategy, modernize localization and taxonomy, guide subject matter experts, and transform professional content creators into modular content architects. It will also create demand for specialists in content data optimization, localization, ontologies and metadata, prompting, and measurement. – Kathleen Pierce
  • Answer engines being acquiring sources of human created content. Not quite one-third of US and UK online adults trust information provided by genAI. As answer engines and agentic browsers gain further adoption in 2026, large revenue sharing programs like Perplexity’s Publisher’s Program will not be sufficient for consumers to trust the content being used to generate answers. In the race to retain consumer trust, one answer engine will begin talks to acquire a source of human created content (think: news or media outlet, community forums) to gain an additional source of credibility. In 2026, transparency will finally become a primary lever to increase consumer trust and usage of AI. – Chuck Gahun
  • Computational limitations shortchange consumer’s thirst for video. Consumers love video. Nearly two out of five of U.S. online adults tell Forrester they are likely to discover or purchase products they see on video sharing platform YouTube. While today’s models can generate high-fidelity images and short video sequences, they remain years away from producing coherent, feature-length narratives or interactive 3D environments at scale. Limitations on scene memory and physical realism hinder the creation of long-form content, and these limitations are not likely to change during 2026. The culprit? Limits in resources to advance computational requirements. According to the MIT Technology Review, the already consequential power, water, and cooling requirements of the server farms that power AI will increase drastically, especially for video generation. Eventually, advancements in diffusion models and AI chip power will negate this limitation, but not during 2026. Prepare for video shorts to dominate social and streaming platforms in the meantime. – Jay Pattisall

Want to learn more – or talk about any of these topics with us? Book a Guidance Session! And stay tuned for more thinking from us on where all things content are headed in 2026 and beyond.