Marketing leaders report acting on bad AI recommendations, feeling board pressure to adopt AI and losing revenue to poor data
BOSTON — Aug. 25, 2026 — Validity today released “The State of CRM Data Management in 2026” report, revealing that marketing leadership has pushed AI adoption well ahead of confidence in the data behind it.
Based on a survey of 500 B2B and B2C marketing professionals across the U.S., U.K., Brazil, Australia and New Zealand, the report finds that C-suite and SVP/VP roles have the most exposure to bad CRM data and are the most likely to act on it anyway. Nearly 78% of C-suite and 92% of SVP/VPs respondents say they have acted on an AI recommendation they later suspected was wrong because of bad underlying data, compared with 41% of individual contributors.
Nearly 60% of C-suite respondents and 52% of SVP/VPs say they feel pressure to implement AI tools now, despite knowing their underlying data isn’t ready. That pressure is adding to a problem leadership already knows exists: 67% of C-suite respondents admit campaign data is, at times, manipulated to make results look better to leadership, nearly double the 38% rate reported organization-wide.
Those consequences are compounding fast as AI tools driving marketing decisions are increasingly unchecked by humans: Two out of three organizations increased the number of marketing decisions delegated to autonomous AI agents in the past year. Yet just 21% of marketers say their CRM data is “very well prepared” to support AI. Once autonomous tools are in the mix, a bad data point stops being a passive error and becomes an active instruction, one that an AI agent may act on before anyone has a chance to catch it.
Poor CRM data also has measurable financial and reputational consequences, as 62% of organizations report losing revenue directly due to poor CRM data quality. Nearly a third of teams spend six or more hours a week just fixing and reconciling data instead of driving growth. Poor data has also contributed, to some degree, to compliance exposure (63%) and delayed or scrapped campaigns (67%). Despite that exposure, only 41% of organizations report having a dedicated data governance team or owner specifically to manage regulatory and privacy risk.
“I grew up as a scientist and was trained to never just believe, but instead always verify with data and think critically about the results,” said Mark Briggs, founder, chairman and CEO at Validity. “We take this approach constantly at Validity, from the boardroom to our customers’ meeting rooms. In this sea of AI-inspired change, I am amazed at how many other folks don’t take the time and steps to trust their data and remain proud of fellow leaders who make sure to get this step right.”
Marketers point to a clear fix: Continuous, automated monitoring that catches and fixes data issues in real time is the top capability marketers say would most increase their confidence in CRM data, cited by 39% overall and rising to 47% among C-suite respondents specifically, well ahead of consolidating onto one unified platform (23%) or adding third-party data validation or enrichment (19%).
The “State of CRM Data Management in 2026” report is available at [https://www.validity.com/resource-center/state-of-crm-data-report-2026/].
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About Validity
Validity created the AI platform behind the world’s most successful email programs. For nearly 30 years, Validity has operated at the center of the email ecosystem—shaping how it works, setting the standards others follow, and earning the trust of the world’s biggest brands and mailbox providers. That trust is built on the world’s largest email data network: proprietary signals from ISPs, exclusive mailbox provider partnerships, and more than 2.5 billion behavioral data points processed daily. This data-driven foundation powers Validity Engage, the AI email platform that helps enterprise teams know what to send, when to send it, and who’s ready to receive it—so every send is smarter than the last. For more information, visit validity.com or connect with us on LinkedIn.
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