Adoption is past experimentation, and the volume is in production

Advertising has the clearest numbers. IAB’s 2026 Digital Video Ad Spend and Strategy Report finds that nearly two in three digital video buyers now use generative AI for creative, up from half in 2025. A third of their ad assets are expected to involve generative AI this year, up from a quarter in 2025, with buyers projecting 43 percent by 2027. That is happening inside a U.S. digital video ad market IAB projects will pass $80 billion in 2026, growing 11 percent year over year, nearly 20 percent faster than the total ad market.

The interesting detail for architects is what the creative is used for. IAB’s prior-year data showed buyers reaching for generative AI specifically to produce audience-specific versions of an ad, visual style variations and contextually adapted cuts. That is not one asset per campaign. That is a matrix.

Games are the instructive counterexample. GDC’s 2026 State of the Game Industry puts generative AI use at 36 percent of industry professionals and 30 percent at game studios specifically, but the usage breakdown is dominated by language models rather than media generation: research and brainstorming at 81 percent, code assistance and routine writing at 47 percent each, prototyping at 35 percent. The most-used tools are ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot. Sentiment is sharply negative, with 52 percent saying generative AI is having a negative impact on the industry, rising to 64 percent among visual and technical artists. Asset-centric pipelines have not landed in games the way they have in advertising, and the constraint is as much workforce and provenance as it is tooling.