MGS 2026 Recap: Moloco's AI Disruption Index and the Marketing Moat
Have you added more AI tools, only to see marketing results barely move? Moloco's diagnosis is that the bottleneck may not be the AI engine at all, but the share of work people are still holding onto.
The AI Disruption Index is a study by Moloco and BCG that measures how much AI is disrupting the customer journey in each industry and how well each business is defended by its customer relationships. The daglo marketing team attended MGS 2026, and this post recaps "AI Disruption Index: Moloco's Marketing Moat," a session by Sangeun Park of Moloco. We transcribed the session with daglo and went back through the transcript to check every number.
Modern Growth Stack (MGS) 2026 is a growth marketing conference hosted by AB180, the company behind Airbridge. It ran July 21 to 24, 2026, at the Westin Seoul Parnas under the theme "Stack AI, Rewrite Everything." See the official MGS 2026 site.
What is the AI Disruption Index?
The 2026 AI Disruption Index draws on 283 marketing executives, 15 industries, five regions, and data from more than 3,000 apps. One axis measures how much AI is changing the market; the other measures the strength of customer relationships, or how defensible a business is.
| Axis | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Level of AI disruption | Discovery collapse (AI agents and zero-click search make brands less likely to be found) and service collapse (comparison, recommendation, and transactions all happen inside AI, bypassing the service) |
| Strength of customer relationships | Long-term loyalty, engagement inside apps and CRM, and owned channels such as your own app and email |
Travel, where AI now handles everything from search to booking, was the most exposed. Social media, which people open by habit every day, had the deepest moat. The takeaway: facing the same AI shift, businesses with direct customer relationships are far better defended.
A market with unlimited supply: 1,500 new apps a day and a 30% CPI jump
557,000 apps launched in 2025, about 1,500 a day. The speaker called the post-agentic-coding surge app development's "YouTube moment."
The real change of the AI era is that everyone builds faster. Supply has exploded, but the population hasn't grown and the day is still 24 hours long.
- Cost per install (CPI) rose 30% in a year.
- Keeping an existing customer is at least five times more efficient than acquiring a new one.
So the question becomes: who owns the relationship with the customer? Moloco sees that relationship as the last asset AI can't route around.
The customer journey is moving inside AI interfaces
The customer journey isn't disappearing. It is moving into AI interfaces brands can't see. Brands now compete with the conclusion AI hands the customer.
| Stage | What's happening now |
|---|---|
| Awareness | One in three US adults already discovers brands through a personal AI agent, and 80% of Google searches with AI summaries end without a click |
| Consideration | 47% of consumers are willing to use generative AI to research what to buy |
| Conversion | 30% are fine with AI making the purchase for them |
If AI doesn't recommend you, the journey ends before the customer reaches you.
Move budget to living channels: why in-app is the first layer
About 35% of marketing budgets still sit in channels AI is shaking up: paid search, display, and affiliate. The other 65% sits in living channels: in-app, email and CRM, retail media, CTV, and social.
Display here means the web, which fades as AI replaces search. In-app is different: customers install and open apps on purpose.
- Of every minute spent on mobile, only 6 seconds go to the browser. The other 54 seconds happen inside apps.
- Mobile commerce revenue grew 21% year over year.
- Advertisers that allocated budget to the open internet (the independent app ecosystem) saw 111% higher ROAS than those spending only on Google and Meta.
The speaker's summary: in-app isn't a third channel after Google and Meta. It is the first layer that protects your customer relationships.
The P value and Moloco's 3F principles
What separates AI marketing results isn't engine strength (S) but the share of work handed to AI (P). If P stays at 50%, even a 1,000x better engine can't more than double overall efficiency. At 80% the ceiling is 5x; at 90%, 10x.
The manual share becomes the bottleneck. So the marketer's job shifts from making decisions on AI's behalf to designing the environment where AI performs best.
Moloco's operating playbook is the 3F framework. Here is how campaigns that followed it performed in January and February 2026.
| Principle | What it means | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | Consolidate campaigns so signals aren't scattered | CPA down 16% |
| Feed | Open up as much inventory as possible for AI to explore, without excluding placements | CPA down 16%, stability up 13% |
| Fuel | Supply varied creative formats to cover every placement | Conversion rate up 12% |
| All three combined | Focus, Feed, and Fuel together | ROAS 15% higher, ROAS volatility down 26% |
The drop in volatility matters most, the speaker said. Results that are both higher and steadier give you the confidence to scale budget.
A checklist for your marketing moat in the AI era
Moloco's closing point: the marketers who win didn't switch tools; they rebuilt how they work.
- Count your P value: What share of your marketing work does AI handle? Check the work people still hold before blaming the model.
- Score your customer relationships: Check loyalty, engagement, and owned channels as a defensibility audit.
- Question the urge to split campaigns: Test whether consolidating fragmented campaigns improves learning.
- Report ROAS volatility: Tracking variance alongside the average makes budget increases easier to approve.
When you revisit a talk recording, knowing who said what matters. daglo's Speaker ID remembers voices and fills in real names instead of "Speaker 1" from the next recording on, so you can find a remark even when Q&A is mixed in. daglo is the first service in Korea to offer this to every user. Learn more about Speaker ID
For the rest of the sessions we attended, read our full MGS 2026 recap.
#MGS2026 #ModernGrowthStack #Moloco #AIDisruptionIndex #MarketingMoat #InAppAdvertising #GrowthMarketing #daglo
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