The AI Trust Gap: Why Consumers Are Tuning Out and How to Win Them Back

Conversations in marketing rarely stray away from AI lately. Marketers feel pressure to deliver on the promise of content scaling “in hours rather than weeks or days,” said Meg Moss, head of global agency partnerships at Canva. Generative AI makes that speed possible, yet speed without a point of view carries a hidden cost.

“The risk isn’t just wasted budget; it’s lost trust with a direct line to revenue,” Moss said during a thought leadership spotlight about “The AI Trust Gap: Why Consumers Are Tuning Out and How to Win Them Back,” at From Day One’s Chicago marketing conference. In an age of creative velocity, speed alone no longer sets a brand apart. The brands that pull ahead back that speed with human direction, consumer trust, and strong governance, she says. 

Marketers and Consumers Split on AI

To measure the distance between how marketers feel about AI and how audiences respond to it, Canva commissioned The Harris Poll to survey 1,415 marketing leaders and 3,547 consumers across seven markets for its 2026 State of Marketing and AI Report.

The results point in opposite directions. Ninety-seven percent of marketing leaders use AI in their daily creative work, and nearly all plan to increase their investment in it, according to the report. Consumers, meanwhile, are evaluating, judging, and pushing back on content that doesn’t feel earned. For Moss, that leaves marketers with one central tension: “how fast versus how well.”

The consumer numbers make the point. Sixty-five percent say AI-generated ads are so obvious they’re laughable, 70% say those ads lack soul, and 87% say the best advertising still requires a human touch.

When speed and volume push human direction aside, Moss says, teams end up with AI slop. “It’s polished, but it’s hollow. It doesn’t say anything to your customers, and we’re obviously in a sea of sameness,” Moss observed. “This is the cost that doesn’t show up in your AI budget line, but it shows up in your brand sentiment.”

Moss stressed that the backlash targets how brands use the technology, not the technology itself. “I promise this isn’t an anti-AI story. Canva is an AI company, but it is conditional,” she said. Sixty-eight percent of consumers don’t mind AI in ads if the ads are helpful or relevant, yet 78% would still rather see ads made by people, according to Canva’s report. 

“They aren’t rejecting AI; they’re rejecting laziness,” Moss said.

In her view, AI has lowered production costs while raising the value of taste. “AI collapses the cost of execution, not judgment,” she said. That shift changes the question teams should ask. “When AI makes almost every idea possible, the question is no longer, ‘Can we make this?’ It’s ‘Should we make this?’” Moss said.

Marketing leaders seem to agree. Asked what AI can never replicate, 42% named empathy and emotional intelligence, while 41% cited brand intuition and creative judgment, according to the report. Three-quarters expect creative roles to grow over the next five years. The irony, Moss said, is that creativity “has become more strategic, not less.”

Direction, Velocity, and Trust

Moss outlined three principles that, working together, turn AI into a growth engine rather than a tool stack. Direction differentiates, velocity gets a team in the game, and trust sustains it.

“AI raises the floor of execution, but your point of view is what makes the work unforgettable,” she explained. “High volume without direction just creates noise. High volume with direction creates a competitive advantage.”

Trust depends on transparency, especially as AI-made ads become harder to detect. Seventy percent of consumers believe they’ll eventually be impossible to tell apart without disclosure, Canva’s 2026 State of Marketing and AI Report shows.

Responsible AI governance needs a strategic approach. “It requires clear guardrails, defined standards, and intentional design,” she said. 

Make AI Integration Intentional

Many teams still treat AI as a generic layer on top of their old processes. “Generic AI produces generic results, and existing workflows don’t optimize for the new capabilities,” she said. 

Her answer is workflow optimization by design. Teams need to map where AI steps in, where humans step in, and where AI steps out. “There’s almost no way to accidentally get meaningful impact from AI agents. You have to be intentional,” Moss said.

Rebuilding long-standing workflows is a change management challenge, Moss acknowledges, and Canva had to do it, too. The company built a culture around AI use, even asking in internal surveys, “Did you use AI for this, and how did you use it?” It also asked teams to treat AI “less like a tool and more like a teammate.”

Canva’s marketing team integrates AI into each campaign. During planning, it uses Canva’s AI-powered search to surface insights and files from the previous year’s campaign, Moss says. For content creation, the team prompts AI to brainstorm visual directions, and the outputs stay fully editable. It also used Canva Code to build an interactive checklist of human-led checks for AI-powered content.

Brand kits keep the output on brand. By attaching a brand kit to Canva AI, the team applies its fonts, colors, and tone of voice to every design which has eliminated much of the back-and-forth in production.

Data analytics tools inside the platform made it easier to pull data for campaign check-ins and reviews. Automation handles the heavy lifting of localization: the team uses Bulk Create to produce batches of copy for paid campaigns and adapt headlines, text, and graphics for different regions. “This used to take weeks, and actually is one of those times where we now can say it actually takes us hours,” Moss said.

How eXp Realty Removed Bottlenecks

Moss pointed to eXp Realty, a global real estate brokerage with more than 82,000 agents, as a customer that scaled without losing its brand. The brokerage integrated Canva Enterprise with its internal systems, allowing agents to pull listing details directly into brand-controlled marketing materials.

With design tools such as Bulk Create, agents in every market can generate campaigns without having to file design requests. The result: eXp has quadrupled its approval speed, according to Canva’s case study.

Moss closed by reframing consumer trust as a leadership issue. “AI trust is not a content problem; it’s an operating model problem,” she declared. Chief marketing officers must decide where AI can move fast, where humans stay accountable, and how trust gets measured. 

Canva took three steps: auditing every customer touchpoint to identify where AI was involved, classifying each by trust risk to determine the level of review and executive oversight needed, and defining who would own judgment, taste, claims, disclosures, and final approval.

The winners of this current wave of AI-powered digital transformation will be the organizations that invest in human judgment, not just infrastructure. “As AI becomes standard, how will your brand stand out?” Moss posited. 

Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Canva, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight.

Ade Akin covers artificial intelligence, workplace wellness, HR trends, and digital health solutions.

(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)