Dive Brief:
- A large share of marketers think artificial intelligence is creating a bigger carbon footprint, but many are not measuring the full environmental impact of their tech usage, according to a new report from climate technology and advisory firm 51toCarbonZero.
- Among surveyed senior marketing leaders, 88% see AI increasing their carbon footprint while 42% believe AI results in significantly higher emissions. Yet, only 36% of those leaders have comprehensively measured the environmental effects of their bets on AI and 8% have not done so at all.
- Awareness around the pitfalls of the AI boom are in tension with strides elsewhere in marketers’ sustainability efforts. Budgetary concerns around sustainability have fallen since 2025 while 85% of marketers report moderate to significant progress in cutting back emissions.
Dive Insight:
The environmental downsides of investing in AI, including the resource-intensive data centers required to support the technology, have become a flashpoint of consumer concern. Marketers largely seem aware of the problem as well, but many have not put in the legwork to fully understand the extent to which AI is intensifying their carbon footprint, a hindrance to their larger sustainability initiatives.
The dissonance identified by 51toCarbonZero, where the lion’s share of marketers believe AI is ramping up emissions, but fewer than half have fully accounted for their AI impact, comes as many CMOs feel under pressure to quickly master the complex and costly technology. 51toCarbonZero chalked some of the gap up to a governance challenge for marketing organizations that otherwise believe they are making improvements in sustainability practices.
“Businesses cannot effectively reduce what they are not measuring — and there is still work to do to build greater visibility around AI’s environmental impact,” 51toCarbonZero Co-founder and CEO Richard Davis said in a statement attached to the research.
51toCarbonZero partnered with Censuswide to conduct surveys of 100 U.S. and 100 U.K. marketing leaders in June of this year for its Zeroed In: The Brand Marketing Pulse benchmark report. Respondents were senior management or C-suite level marketers at large brands from multiple sectors.
Some differences in sentiment surfaced by region. For example, 51% of U.S. marketers perceive a significant uptick in emissions from AI compared to 32% of U.K. marketers who said the same. Broadly, marketers are feeling the steep price tag of AI in addition to the environmental factor. Eighty-eight percent say that AI is pushing up operational costs, while 35% said it is doing so to a substantial degree.
The AI findings cast a shadow over progress elsewhere on the sustainability front. Just 17% of marketers are concerned about budget in this area, down 20 percentage points from 2025. Under a quarter see internal alignment around sustainability as a key challenge.
51toCarbonZero’s report arrives as the early AI hype continues to cool, with growing public outcry against the tech and sharper investor skepticism. Some AI-focused platforms are using marketing to try and allay consumers’ AI fears. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this week shared a video that puts an optimistic, human-led spin on AI. The Facebook and Instagram owner plans to put paid media behind the campaign, Adweek reported.
