AI adoption surges at RSAC, but governance controls lag behind

Daily GenAI use has already become routine for marketing teams, but the harder problem is turning that habit into something companies can actually govern. ProGEO.ai’s March 2026 AI Marketing Maturity Index, published April 13, found that 75.9% of 112 marketing professionals surveyed at RSAC said they use GenAI for work every day, while only 43.8% said their company enforces a GenAI usage policy with technical controls.

That gap matters because RSAC is not a casual trade show. Held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, RSAC 2026 drew nearly 44,000 attendees, 700 speakers, 600 exhibitors and 400 members of the media. In that kind of environment, where marketing teams operate alongside cybersecurity buyers and enterprise risk managers, the question is no longer whether people are using GenAI. It is whether companies can prove they are using it safely, consistently and in ways that hold up under scrutiny.

The numbers show broad adoption without matching discipline. ProGEO.ai said 91.1% of respondents had a corporate-paid subscription to at least one GenAI platform, and 49.1% said they had multiple enterprise subscriptions. Content work dominated the use cases: 83% said they use GenAI to brainstorm content at least weekly, 82.1% said they are creating content with it, and 75% said they are repurposing content. Another 23.2% said they use GenAI for vibe coding at least weekly, a reminder that usage is spreading beyond copy and into technical workflows.

The company’s point is that access alone is not maturity. ProGEO.ai frames the AIMM Index as a baseline for enterprise adoption rates and marketing use cases, not just a headcount of people who have tried a chatbot. That framing borrows from the way security teams already think about control. The Department of Defense uses the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification for contractors, and MITRE offers an AI Maturity Model and assessment tool for organizations measuring progress in AI maturity. ProGEO.ai is aiming at the same problem in marketing: not whether the tool exists, but whether the workflow is disciplined enough to be trusted.

That is where agencies now have room to differentiate. Clients do not just want faster content production or more prompt access. They want operating models that combine AI-powered efficiency with policy enforcement, review steps and repeatable use cases. The firms winning this phase will be the ones that can package GenAI as a controlled delivery system, not a loose experiment.