New Remesh Study Reveals Stark Disconnect: Marketers Overestimate Consumer Comfort with AI-Generated Content

53% of consumers say AI-written content reduces trust or completely puts them off, while 86% of marketers use AI regularly

NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, May 26, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Remesh, the AI-powered conversational research platform, today released findings from its Consumer Insights Report: Understanding the Gap Between Consumer Wants and Marketer Assumptions — a study that uncovers a significant and growing rift between how marketers are communicating and what consumers actually want.

The study's most striking finding: while 86.3% of marketers use AI regularly to produce content, more than half of consumers (52.8%) say AI-written content reduces their trust in a brand or puts them off entirely. Consumers describe AI-generated content as “lazy,” “unoriginal,” and lower effort — a sharp contrast to marketers’ apparent confidence in its role.

Key Findings
- The AI Trust Gap: 52.8% of consumers report that AI-written content reduces trust or puts them off completely, yet 86.3% of marketers deploy AI regularly. Nearly a third of consumers (31.5%) say AI content outright reduces their trust in a brand.
- Consumers Can Spot It: 84.2% of consumers say they can detect AI-generated content at least sometimes. Detection signals include formulaic structure, overly polished tone, and unnatural wording.
- Reviews Are Undervalued: Consumers rank online reviews nearly on par with word of mouth (4.13 vs. 4.32 weighted score), but marketers rank reviews significantly lower (3.08) — a gap of more than 33%.
- Social Media Overestimation: Marketers believe 30% of customers go first to social platforms when making purchase decisions, while in reality only 11.8% do, a 2.5x overestimation.
- Confidence vs. Reality: 91.6% of marketers are confident they understand their customers, yet only 63.8% of consumers feel that brands actually understand them.
- Messaging Style Mismatch: 55% of consumers prefer straightforward, factual communication from brands, but only 36% of marketers report that as their primary style.

“The promise of AI was efficiency, and it delivered,” said Emma Borochoff, VP Marketing at Remesh, “What nobody stress-tested was whether efficiency and connection could scale together. Turns out, consumers noticed much more than marketers ever realized."

About the Study
This research was conducted using the Remesh platform with parallel conversational sessions for both marketers and consumers. Remesh's methodology uniquely combines real-time open-ended qualitative responses, quant style questions, and AI-assisted thematic analysis — enabling simultaneous collection and synthesis of insights at scale.

The marketer sample skewed under 40 (69.8% aged 25–39) and included brand and marketing managers, founders, and business owners, primarily from DTC and e-commerce. The consumer sample spanned a broader age range with meaningful representation across all age bands up to 65+, drawn from the United States (69%) and the United Kingdom (31%).

About Remesh
Remesh is a hybrid insights platform built for market researchers and employee experience professionals that enables organizations to speak with their audience as one — whether live, asynchronous, or via video. Remesh uniquely combines quantitative and qualitative question formats, speed, and scale to present and analyze audience responses simultaneously.

Remy, Remesh's embedded AI agent purpose-built for researchers, helps teams design studies, surface themes, and connect cross-study data — enabling faster insights without sacrificing depth or quality.

To learn more or request a demo, visit remesh.ai.

Gabby Caton
Remesh
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