JOURNAL: MEASUREMENT OVER VOLUME: KPI DISCIPLINE AND PERCEIVED RETURNS TO MARKETING AI IN SLOVAKIA

Firms are adopting artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing faster than they can establish whether it pays off, and firm-level evidence on when deployment translates into perceived returns remains scarce, particularly for Central and Eastern Europe. This study asks whether, among firms that have already put AI to work in marketing, perceived returns depend on how much AI they deploy or on how well they measure it. Drawing on 209 marketing-AI adopters from the 2025 survey in Slovakia (N = 816), it models perceived performance gains as a function of organizational AI maturity, the breadth of AI deployment across marketing and sales use cases, and AI-specific key performance indicator (KPI) measurement discipline. Marketing and sales is the most frequent AI application domain (37.2% of AI-using firms); chatbots (50.2%), campaign automation (45.5%), and personalized offers (41.6%) lead the portfolio. Maturity is associated with broader deployment (b = 1.944, p < .001) and stronger measurement (b = 0.430, p < .001), yet only the latter is robustly tied to perceived gains: measurement discipline exceeds deployment breadth (β = 0.442 vs 0.185), and the two practices together account for the maturity–gains association (direct path non-significant; total indirect 0.199, 95% CI [0.127, 0.278]). Benefits and concerns rise together (ρ = 0.65) rather than trading off. For managers, the implication is that systematic measurement is at least as important as scaling the number of AI use cases.

Authors: Peter Štetka, Nora Grisáková, Vladimír Hojdik, Dana Hrušovská