It's a churn number most marketing dashboards never explain, because the cause isn't sitting in marketing's usual territory. Drawing on insight from CX transformation work, this piece looks at where that gap actually sits, and what it means for marketing's claim to a seat at the AI table.
Where is the gap actually opening up?
New enterprise research from analyst firm Aspire CCS found that one in five customers globally, rising to one in four among 18 to 45 year olds, switched provider in the past year because of a poor communications experience. Five of the top six reasons customers gave for leaving were tied directly to communication content: information that was unclear, inconsistent, irrelevant, or pitched in the wrong tone for the moment.
That is a marketing problem hiding in an operations budget. Customers do not separate a badly timed statement from a badly made product; both erode trust the same way. Yet the emails, letters and confirmations customers receive most often are still usually owned by IT or operations, built once, and rarely revisited.
What's stopping marketing from claiming the win?
Most enterprises already have the channels customers expect: apps, chat, portals, real-time notifications. The constraint is rarely the technology. It is the content flowing through it. The pattern shows up across almost every sector: organisations have the chat, the portal and the app, but the content flowing through those channels is often static, generic and disconnected from the individual.
A great example of this in practice is from one of our clients who took a document every business in their sector sends as routine, a static annual statement, and rebuilt what flowed through it into personalised, on-demand content. Click-through more than tripled. That kind of win is often already sitting inside the marketing budget, disguised as an operational document nobody has looked at in years.
Why does AI in communications need marketing in the room?
AI adoption in customer communications has moved well past the pilot stage, with content generation, translation and compliance support now the most common use cases. But adoption speed and governance maturity are not moving at the same pace, and that gap tends to widen quietly rather than loudly.
Paul Maddock, CTO of MBA Pulse, puts the distinction plainly: "There's an important difference between automation and intelligence. Automation follows fixed rules to remove effort from a task. Real intelligence adapts, learns and improves the outcome itself. The ones getting genuine value aren't the ones deploying the most tools. They're the ones asking the harder question first: are we actually making something better?"
That is as much a marketing question as a technology one. The businesses treating it that way give marketing and CX teams a leading role in setting how AI gets used in customer-facing content, rather than leaving governance entirely to IT or legal.
Why does breaking down the marketing and operations divide pay off?
Marketing communications and operational communications have historically run on different technology, different ownership and different KPIs. Customers do not experience that split. They experience one relationship with one brand.
Tom Anderson, Digital Director at MBA Group, has watched both sides talk past each other for years: "Marketing will tell you they can't scale personalisation without scaling headcount. Operations will tell you every team has their own version of the customer. The thing typically holding both teams back is not ambition, it's the difference in systems, data sources and access serving the same customer."
Only 13% of enterprises describe their marketing and operational communications as fully integrated, and businesses that have connected the two see customer satisfaction scores nearly double those that have not (Aspire CCS, 2026). Anderson's point is that closing that gap doesn't necessarily always mean a multi-year rebuild. Most of the fix sits in rationalising what already exists: a bloated template library, a simpler change-request process, shared visibility of what's actually being sent.
