AI in Marketing Practices of Greek Micro-Enterprises: An Integrative Review

AI tools have sharply reduced the cost of producing marketing content, but reduced cost does not by itself produce marketing performance. This review asks how micro-enterprises in Greece, which make up 94.7% of the country’s non-agricultural firms, adopt AI in marketing, and what determines whether adoption succeeds. Following established integrative review protocols, it synthesizes 74 sources under a single evidence-type classification: 41 peer-reviewed empirical studies, 8 peer-reviewed reviews, 11 conceptual contributions, 6 computational benchmarks, 4 official statistical sources, and 4 policy or legal documents. Three findings emerge. First, AI tools reduce marketing costs but require absorptive capacity to deliver performance; access to tools and possession of capability have become decoupled. Second, the constraints binding Greek micro-firms are environmental and institutional rather than technological, and include grant eligibility rules that exclude the smallest firms and a language resource gap whose cost implications remain unquantified. Third, the disclosure obligations of the EU AI Act interact with a documented authenticity penalty that falls hardest on firms with no brand equity to absorb it. This review develops a contextualized adoption model for Greek micro-enterprises, organized as four layers: production, capability, environment, and legitimacy. Because no existing study observes AI marketing adoption in this population directly, the model is presented as six testable propositions rather than as a validated account, and a structured research agenda is set out.