Building a campaign used to take hours. Defining triggers, mapping logic, connecting each step manually. The workflow was the work.
That’s changing. And the results are specific enough to be worth paying attention to: with Active Intelligence, ActiveCampaign’s AI engine, new users are launching their first AI-powered campaign in about 18 minutes. The same process done manually takes 2.6 hours, an 8x difference.
That’s the capability that earned ActiveCampaign a win in the Automation - Product category of the 2026 AI Excellence Awards, presented by the Business Intelligence Group. The recognition matters, but that stat is the real story.
Customers define the outcome they want, and AI handles the build
The shift isn’t just about speed. It’s where marketers spend their attention.
Instead of configuring how a campaign should run, marketers using Active Intelligence define what they want to achieve, and the AI delivers on execution. Campaigns are built up to 3x faster overall, and Active Intelligence has become the fastest-growing product capability that ActiveCampaign has released, based on internal adoption data.
Faster execution isn’t the end goal. It’s what faster execution frees up: time to think about strategy, messaging, and the customer relationships that drive revenue and grow your business.
“The answer is almost always ‘yes, it can be done’”
Speed is table stakes. What makes automation worth deploying is how well it adapts to the way real businesses operate, and that varies enormously.
One ActiveCampaign user on Reddit, who manages automation setups for multiple businesses, put it plainly:
I work with many different businesses using ActiveCampaign. The common thread is automation and integration… We’re automating 1:1 emails immediately. The answer is almost always ‘yes, it can be done.’
That flexibility, the ability to handle diverse business logic without constant workarounds, is what keeps automation from becoming shelfware.
AI that earns its place in your tech stack
Partners working inside complex client ecosystems are often the most skeptical evaluators of AI claims, which makes this Belacom take worth paying attention to. The ActiveCampaign partner works across different tech environments and shared this on LinkedIn:
[ActiveCampaign] is currently the most advanced solution in terms of AI (without marketing ‘fluff’) and natively offers a connected CRM Marketing & CRM Sales solution that integrates with almost any technological environment.
That “without marketing fluff” framing is what I’m most proud of as a Product Marketing Leader. We know that practitioners in the field are tuning out AI hype quickly, and we are confident that ActiveCampaign is able to deliver capabilities that partners can use with their clients and see results from.
Personalization that scales without the overhead
As customer expectations for relevance grow, so does the pressure to segment and personalize at a level that was previously only feasible for large teams with dedicated resources.
Chris Clark of Toss and Spin, an ActiveCampaign customer, described how this plays out in practice:
Targeted emails to specific groups at the right time…outperform large database blasts. Relevance drives revenue…and segmentation allows us to send much more personalized messages.
The point isn’t that personalization works. Marketers already know that. The point is that AI is removing the execution barrier that made personalization hard to execute at scale.
A verified ActiveCampaign user on G2 described the impact: “The AI Assistant… is revolutionary—it makes creating campaigns and automations faster and smarter than ever before…helping us work more efficiently and deliver better results.”
What this award signals next in marketing
The Business Intelligence Group’s AI Excellence Awards recognized companies that are demonstrating measurable impact with AI, not just adoption. For ActiveCampaign, this recognition lands at a specific moment: Active Intelligence is moving from feature to foundation, showing up across the product in ways that compound results over time for our customers.
Manual campaign builds don’t just cost time. They cost experiments you didn’t run, the segments you didn’t test, and the follow-ups that went out later than you planned. But with campaign builds that are 3x faster, at just 18 minutes to build the first one, and more effective, ActiveCampaign customers are operating at a pace that wasn’t possible a year ago. The gap between them and everyone still building manually is widening.
View the full list of 2026 AI Excellence Award winners here.
