Week of April 13, 2026
AI confidence by AI maturity level
9 in 10 beginner marketers don't trust AI-assisted work (but that changes as they level up their AI maturity)
9% vs 91%
Nearly 9 in 10 Beginners lack confidence in the quality of AI-assisted work; a gap that closes almost entirely by the Advanced stage, and completely at the Expert level.
Source: AI Maturity Quiz | N=769
“As we move from experimentation to implementation, confidence compounds through better data and governance. The real gap in AI today is not capability, but trust.”
Elisha Danladi, Softdatacore
Analysis
What the numbers actually mean.
01
Confidence isn't a personality trait. It's a usage metric.
Only 9% of Beginners feel confident about AI-assisted work quality. BCG's AI at Work 2025 report confirms when companies train employees in AI, they’re more likely to express confidence. Nothing changed about the person. What’s more likely to have changed is how deeply they integrated AI into their process.
02
The confidence tipping point is Intermediate → Advanced.
Going from Intermediate to Advanced is when marketers report feeling confidence in AI’s quality jumps from 57% to 86%—the stage where users stop second-guessing AI outputs and start trusting them as a baseline to refine. It's a fundamental shift from “AI helps me” to “AI empowers me”.
03
Data talks, and it’s clear that AI gives marketers increased confidence.
The more you use AI, the more confident you become. Hesitation isn't a sign of healthy skepticism; it's a sign of insufficient experience. AI Coach, Ed Gandia, believes it’s never too late to adopt AI. Read how he approaches AI and gains confidence by embracing it (slowly).
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