The Evolution of Artificial Intelligence in Marketing: A Bibliometric Analysis of Three Decades (1992–2025)

Over the past three decades, artificial intelligence (AI) has substantially reshaped marketing research and practice, yet the discipline has not established a systematic understanding of its evolutionary trajectory and intellectual structure. A bibliometric analysis of 1923 Scopus publications (1992–2025) was conducted using CiteSpace to explore collaboration patterns, conceptual development, and thematic organization. It identified six evolutionary stages with accelerating innovation cycles, starting with neural networks (1992–2000) and ending with generative AI (2024–2025), with research attention per stage compressing from approximately 9 years to just 2 years. The analysis of the collaboration network shows that the key contributors are India, China, the USA, and the UK. Co-citation analysis indicates that there are three thematic dimensions with seven clusters, namely: (i) AI technological foundations and capabilities, (ii) AI marketing applications and transformation, and (iii) responsible AI governance and ethics. It suggests a Three-Force Evolutionary Framework, which combines technology-push, market-pull, and governance-moderator forces to describe the dynamics of the field. This framework shows that the Regulatory Awakening of 2018 (e.g., GDPR and the Cambridge Analytica incident) guided, not limited, innovation, and highlighted the critical personalization–privacy paradox on which modern developments are based. It identifies three priority research directions: generative AI in creative marketing, consumer trust in the personalization–privacy paradox, and organizational adaptation to fast innovation cycles. This study provides scholars with a comprehensive knowledge map, practitioners with strategic imperatives for responsible AI adoption, and policymakers with evidence that well-designed regulation accelerates innovation by balancing commercial value with societal concerns.