AdTech’s AI Appetite: A Case Study in Advertisers’ Perceptions and Concerns of AI Integration
Authors: Boyle Rachael , Pledger Ruslana , Brown Hans-frederick 
Published: August 2024

As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies continue to advance, the integration of AI into business operations, particularly into business-to-business software-as-a-solution (B2B SaaS) organizations, presents both opportunities and challenges. This paper addresses the critical need for understanding the potential benefits and risks of adopting AI, focusing on the perspectives of both B2B customers and employees. The study is particularly relevant in the context of advertising, where AI plays a significant role in shaping business strategies and consumer experiences but can also introduce financial, legal, and reputation risks. While existing research highlights potential consumer concerns and potential benefits, there is a notable gap in understanding the adoption phase from the perspective of B2B businesses, particularly within regulated industries like advertising. Our study brings in the perspectives of the marketers using the AI tools and the advertising technology employees that create, adopt, and implement the AI tools. We argue that these perspectives are vital since marketers, as the customer of the advertising technology tool, determine the success of the tool and employees, as the experts of the product, influence what ultimately gets built. As UX researchers at LiveRamp, a B2B SaaS company operating in the ad tech space undergoing this AI adoption phase, we conducted a comprehensive survey study with 469 customers and 166 employees to inform our own AI strategy. With this survey, we investigate various aspects of AI adoption, including perceptions, awareness, utility, concerns, barriers, and preferred levels of automation/transparency. We also capture these perspectives specifically along the various steps of the actual advertising user journey to better understand where we should invest in AI first and where we should not introduce it. Some preliminary findings showed that while customers are legitimately concerned about privacy, this concern is only the top priority in theory rather than in practice. For actual implementation, privacy concerns are overshadowed by technical limitations and concerns over accuracy. In contrast, employees are much more concerned about privacy and ethical data use. Some of the most passionate concerns were voiced by employee AI-advocates concerned over failing to adopt AI quickly enough and AI-averse customers who worry about the accuracy of the AI. While there is a general inclination towards seeing AI's benefits as outweighing its risks, there is also a notable level of uncertainty or neutrality among respondents too, especially among our customers. We plan on furthering these insights by performing a correlation analysis, using Spearman’s Rank-Correlation Coefficient, on the survey results to test whether there is a significant correlation between prior AI experience or technical proficiency and concerns/willingness to adopt AI. We believe this study serves as a valuable case study for other B2B SaaS businesses navigating the complexities of AI adoption in the advertising sector. Furthermore, the study contributes to the broader Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community by shedding light on the top concerns, barriers, and perceptions associated with AI integration, emphasizing the necessity of considering both customer and employee perspectives in the evolving landscape of AI adoption.