Only 8% of Brands Use AI for Campaign Optimisation: The B2B SaaS Affiliate Opportunity This Creates

A Supermetrics study recently published on March 24, has found that while 70% of e-commerce and B2B SaaS brands identify optimising marketing spend as a top priority, only 8% are currently using AI for campaign optimisations. The gap is not a tool availability problem. According to Supermetrics, it is a data infrastructure problem – brands cannot use AI to optimise what they cannot cleanly measure in the first place.

This stat matters for B2B affiliate program managers in a specific and actionable way.

What the Data Gap Means for Your Publisher Mix

The 92% of brands not yet using AI for optimisation are not ignoring the issue. They are stuck. Their data is siloed, inconsistently attributed, or not unified enough to serve as reliable input for machine learning tools.

The products that can help solve this problem such as analytics platforms, attribution tools, customer data platforms, marketing intelligence suites sit squarely in the B2B SaaS category.

This creates a clear content brief for B2B SaaS affiliate publishers. A buyer researching whether to invest in a marketing analytics platform is not just looking for feature comparisons. They want to understand whether the platform solves the specific problem of fragmented measurement — the exact problem the Supermetrics data quantifies.

Publishers who can write credibly to that problem, with data to back the stakes, are the publishers most likely to drive qualified traffic that converts. This aligns with a pattern we have covered previously: the B2B SaaS vertical is structurally positioned to outperform in environments where marketing accountability is high. When CFOs scrutinise spend, the tools that solve measurement problems become easier to sell — and easier to commission through affiliate content.

A Light At The End Of It All – With Better Data For Marketers

The Supermetrics data landed the same week as Zeta Global's Athena AI launch, a platform promising audience segmentation in minutes and campaign workflows in hours. The caveat buried in the announcement: it requires unified, clean data to function. Brands without that foundation cannot access the platform's core capabilities. That dependency is the affiliate angle. The SaaS tools that clean data, unify it, and make it AI-ready are prerequisites for platforms like Athena.

If your affiliate program sells into the marketing technology stack attribution platforms, analytics suites, customer data infrastructure , the Zeta launch and the Supermetrics data together represent the most compelling case for your product category since privacy regulation started eating third-party cookies.

How Program Managers Should Respond To This Stat

For B2B SaaS brands running affiliate programs, the Supermetrics findings are competitive intelligence worth sharing with your publisher partners directly.

A publisher writing a comparison piece on marketing attribution tools now has a survey finding — 92% of brands in their target audience are not yet using AI for campaign optimisation and that makes a genuine lede. That is the kind of specific, timely data that separates useful affiliate content from evergreen category pages. Publisher recruitment should reflect this.

The most valuable partners for B2B SaaS programs in this environment are not high-volume traffic sites. They are authoritative voices in the martech, performance marketing, and digital operations space whose audiences are precisely the professionals wrestling with the data infrastructure gap the Supermetrics study identifies.

Our recent guide on building quality B2B affiliate partnerships and the performance metrics that matter for B2B program measurement are both relevant to go back to and review here.

The 8% figure is not a pessimistic data point. It is a market sizing exercise for B2B SaaS affiliate programs selling into the marketing technology stack. If only 8% of your addressable market has adopted the thing your product enables, the commercial runway is still very long for sales growth in other touch points and talking niches for your affiliates and partners to leverage.

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Developing your B2B affiliate program strategy? Talk to our agency team and discover how KonverJ helps B2B SaaS companies grow their sales with partners that understand how to reach customers and convert them!