AI has emerged as both a powerful ally and a potential threat. A recent Adweek survey reported that in 2024, most marketers believe AI will eliminate more jobs than it creates, and many feel that advertising has lost its creative edge compared to previous years.
As we navigate the changes that come with this AI-driven era, it’s important to understand how we can leverage this tool. Wielding its strengths as a compliment to our own and showcasing the irreplaceable value of humans in marketing.
What AI Can’t Replace: What Gives Us Our Edge
- Strategic Foresight: AI can analyze trends, but it can’t put that data in perspective with broader business goals or identify nuanced market opportunities. Marketers can overlay that data with experience, intuition and foresight.
- Cross-functional Leadership: Building consensus, navigating office politics and aligning diverse teams are uniquely human skills. AI can’t replicate the emotional intelligence required for effective collaboration.
- Creative Storytelling: While AI can generate content, it cannot craft compelling stories that resonate on a human level. Our creativity and empathy allow us to connect with our audiences in a genuine way that AI simply can’t. Consider the difference between the taste of a locally grown strawberry and “red” candy. You expect both to taste like strawberries, but they deliver entirely different experiences.
Practical Ways to Leverage AI in Your Marketing
Here are some actionable ways I use AI to enhance my marketing strategies:
- Proofreading and Grammar: AI can be a great “second set of eyes” to review your writing for errors. It can even offer suggestions to improve flow and make your point clearer. But be careful that word choice suggestions or revisions to your sentence structure don’t strip your voice from the piece. We don’t want to end up sounding like the AI.
- Gap Analysis: This is a function that was off my radar until I attended a webinar with Andy Crestodina, where he showed how to train AI to find gaps in content targeted to your audience. It takes a little time but is so much faster than scouring social media and websites to compile a list of what isn’t being written about.
- Results Summarization: Let AI compile campaign results, or large data sets so that you can spend that time analyzing the results and looking for meaningful trends. There is no need to spend hours compiling data and checking for errors. This adds no value and can easily be done by AI—just be sure to spot-check, as AI still hallucinates.
Faster, Better, Stronger
The key to our future success lies in viewing AI as a complement to human expertise, not a replacement. By embracing AI for data-driven tasks while doubling down on uniquely human expertise like strategic thinking, creativity, and interpersonal communication, we can position ourselves as indispensable guides in an AI-augmented landscape.
As marketers, we must learn to use AI effectively, demonstrating our value by using AI to amplify our strengths to deliver superior results. We must transform our mindset from one that perceives AI as a threat to one that sees it as a catalyst for innovation, allowing us to approach marketing in unprecedented ways.
