Demand Gen Report has opened a Pulse Check survey asking B2B marketing teams how they actually use AI in day-to-day work. The poll, announced under the headline "Pulse Check Survey: How Are B2B Marketing Teams Using AI?", targets practitioners directly rather than analysts or vendors, which is what makes it worth a marketing leader's attention.

The trade outlet runs its Pulse Check series as short, recurring reads on the state of practice inside B2B marketing departments. This edition lands the question most CMOs cannot yet answer from their own dashboards: where in the funnel, the content calendar and the budget line does AI do real work, and where does it sit unused?

Why a practitioner poll matters now

Vendor research on AI in marketing tends to measure ambition — planned adoption, stated intentions, roadmap sentiment. A reader survey fielded by Demand Gen Report works differently. It reaches the publication's audience of demand-generation and marketing-operations professionals, the people who run campaigns, manage marketing automation and decide which tools get opened on a Tuesday morning.

That distinction shapes what the results, once published, will be usable for:

• Benchmarking internal AI adoption against peer B2B teams rather than against vendor case studies.
• Identifying which marketing functions — content production, account research, campaign operations, reporting — carry the heaviest actual AI workload.
• Separating teams that have deployed AI in production from teams still running pilots.
• Gauging whether budget and headcount decisions have followed the tooling, or lagged it.

What does this change for marketing leaders?

Until the results publish, nothing changes operationally. What the survey offers is a low-cost yardstick. When Demand Gen Report tabulates the responses, a CMO can compare the outlet's reader base — skewed toward demand-gen practitioners at B2B firms — with the CMO's own team data on AI usage, licence spend and output volume.

The practical question the survey frames is the one buyer-side marketers keep asking: is AI changing what teams produce, or only how fast they produce it? Demand Gen Report's framing — "how are B2B marketing teams using AI" — puts the emphasis on current use, not future intent, and that emphasis is the survey's main editorial signal.

How to read the results when they land

Trade-press reader polls come with known limits. Respondents self-select, sample sizes are modest compared with analyst panels, and respondents skew toward readers of the fielding publication. None of that makes the data useless; it makes the data directional. A Pulse Check result is a signal to check against first-party numbers, not a substitute for them.

For a marketing leadership audience, the checklist when the results publish is short:

• Compare reported AI adoption rates with your own team's tooling inventory.
• Note which use cases respondents rank highest, and test whether your team's priorities match or diverge.
• Track whether respondents report measurable outcomes or only activity — a recurring gap in AI adoption surveys across the trade press.

Demand Gen Report has not yet published response figures or a release date for the results. Marketing teams that want their operations counted in the benchmark can participate through the survey link carried with the publication's announcement.

A poll of practitioners will not settle the AI-in-marketing debate. It will, at minimum, replace some of the guesswork with numbers drawn from the people running the campaigns.