Why marketers must lead the AI-powered machines
Use AI to make you smarter – not to outsource your thinking.
Generative AI is having a moment, but it’s not one its most enthusiastic promoters want to talk about.
AI platforms have entered the “Trough of Disillusion,” Gartner’s term for the inevitable fall from the dizzying height of the Hype Cycle. This is the low point of the cycle, where we discover AI isn’t the silver-bullet solution to our marketing woes after all.
I’m not here to denigrate GenAI. On the contrary! Chad, the name we have given to our paid version of ChatGPT, helps us with many creative and research tasks. I even asked him – er, it – to help me draft an early outline for this post. (However, I assure you I wrote every word myself from the title to the closing.)
But I’m also a realist. I have seen technology fads come and go. Sometimes a tool falls by the wayside because it didn’t solve the problems its developers claimed it would. Other times, a useful technology gets discarded because people misuse it.
By “misuse,” I mean they violate a basic principle of marketing technology – “Strategy before tactics.” They bought into the technology without having a plan for using it.
When you operate without goals and objectives, you are more likely to fail and waste precious time and money. GenAI can also create a more insidious problem, one whose effects we are just beginning to see today.
The Promise (and Problem) of AI in Marketing
Many organisations jumped into GenAI without thinking strategically or long-term. That’s easy to do because the barrier to entry is low if you begin with just a free version of ChatGPT.
Naturally, AI developers found fertile ground for their inventions. Today, every platform is “AI-powered.” Every tool claims to “save you hours.” That message resonates with overworked and underfunded marketers.
Amid the hype, I saw a problem growing like storm clouds gathering on the horizon. Marketers handed the wheel to their AI platforms, eager to give them a couple of prompts, hit “generate,” and then move on.
That problem has come ashore today. Once again, we are seeing what happens when you jump into a technology without a plan and then rely on it for things it wasn’t designed to deliver.
Is AI making us dumber? Survey says …
The problem goes deeper than “AI slop.”
In June 2025, MIT researchers published “Your Brain on ChatGPT”, a study in which researchers explored the neural consequences of using large language models for tasks like essay writing. It’s easy enough to extrapolate the findings to language-specific projects in marketing, everything from weekly team and campaign reporting to full strategic development.
The MIT study’s findings were as fascinating as they were sobering.
Participants who used AI tools like ChatGPT for ideation and writing showed measurable decreases in brain activity in regions associated with cognitive effort, learning, and memory formation.
Over time, this created what the authors called “cognitive debt” — a subtle but accumulating decline in cognitive resilience. The more people relied on AI to think for them, the less able they were to think deeply on their own.
In other words, outsourcing your thinking too often weakens your ability to think in general. AI can help to scale your brilliance, but it can also just as easily scale garbage. AI can speed up your creative process by taking your prompts and doing the heavy creative lifting. But it can make you lazier because you aren’t doing the difficult work that builds your critical thinking skills.
Instead of freeing you to deal with harder problems, your brain finds it harder to do the mental work those problems require. So they take longer to solve. Where’s the time savings in that?
And, as I noted above, Chad helps me organise my thinking and kickstart the creative process when I’m stuck. But I arrived at that point after first thinking deeply about the problems I faced, the ways Chad could help, and how to use it ethically. My team and I created a strategy, “hired” Chad, developed guidelines, and trained him painstakingly first.
We also don’t ask Chad to do things he’s not qualified for, like writing this blog post or creating complete client reports and campaign plans.
What we marketers must do
We need to wake up to how we’re using AI and what the consequences will be if we don’t.
AI in all of its forms and uses isn’t just a tool. It can be a habit-forming interface. If we train ourselves to skip the hard parts (creating a strategy, solving problems, setting ethical boundaries), we can get soft and become dependent on the technology.
When we cede the hard work to AI, we lose the edge that distinguishes our brand, our products and services, and our abilities from our competitors.
Don’t forget that AI does not generate original insights. It merely rearranges and regurgitates existing knowledge.
Marketers led by soft thinking default to clichés instead of disrupting their markets with standout creativity and originality. It starts in an email campaign and then spreads throughout the marketing team, and from the marketing team to the brand.
These marketers end up copying competitors because that’s what their AI gives them. They rely on ChatGPT to write value propositions with little value for audiences they don’t know, and they don’t even realise they’re doing it!
I wrote about this growing scourge of mimicry-as-marketing in my recent MarTech post, ‘They did it, so we should too’ isn’t an email strategy.
GenAI-driven automation is already cutting out entry-level marketing jobs where newcomers learned the ropes and made the mistakes that helped them build their skills. Relying on reformulated knowledge will not fill the gap from that lost learning.
AI is a tool, not a crutch
I advise my clients not to use AI to replace their brains. I also make it clear how my team and I use AI in the work we do for them. I do this so they know they are getting what they pay for – our knowledge, skills, and expertise put to work for their unique situations, not content recycled from who knows where.
AI will serve everyone best when it’s used to expand knowledge and skill sets. When people use their knowledge and experience to lead the machines instead of relying on machines to set the course.
Here’s how you can stay in control and grow with AI instead:
- Start with a clear strategy and use AI to explore ideas within that frame.
- Write prompts with purpose and direction, not vague concepts, and push back if you don’t get what you want.
- Fact-check, reshape, and refine every AI draft.
- Use AI to challenge assumptions, not reinforce them.
- Build workflows that think before they generate.
My team treats our AI colleague Chad, like a great research assistant. He’s not the creative director. He has to follow our plan. If we don’t get what we want, we push until we do.
Your mantra: Strategy, vision, ethics
A powerful tool in the hands of someone with no vision, ethics, or audience understanding is a liability, not a shortcut. You can’t prompt your way into meaningful messaging if you don’t understand why people buy. Your knowledge and understanding of your market, your customers, and your products must guide all of your AI interactions.
Further, you can’t auto-generate lifecycle journeys if you’ve never mapped your customer journey. Yes, you could ask your GPT to map out a journey, but it will be someone else’s journey.
You can’t personalise at scale if you don’t know how to segment with purpose. That’s the hard work you have to do on your own before you ask your AI platform to work with it.
AI amplifies your strategy and expands your horizons
If your email programme is confused, bloated, or underperforming, AI won’t save you. It might speed things up, but you’ll just end up failing faster.
Build a solid foundation first with material that you create on your own. That includes these building blocks:
- SMART objectives: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound
- Your buyer modalities that categorise different groups of shopper types
- Lifecycle email journeys
- Brand voice
With this material to build on, AI becomes a powerful thinking partner. It doesn’t parrot what others have done. It helps you organise your information and present viewpoints you might not have considered because of your own biases.
Now you can use AI to help you do more quality work in less time on tasks that often get set aside because of deadline pressure or other blockages:
- Explore multiple angles for the same idea: If you have a big team, you can pull people together for some brainstorming exercises. If you are a team of one, juggling multiple projects, this can give you a perspective you might have overlooked.
- Translate one message across buyer types. I mentioned buyer modalities above. Here you can ask AI to help you reduce the time needed to create multiple campaigns in which you shape your campaign message to appeal to different buyer groups: impulse buyers versus methodical people who want to read the fine print before they act.
- Identify gaps in your logic and assumptions: Again, another boon for small email teams. Ask AI, “What am I overlooking?” We all have biases and predilections that can skew our vision and processes. AI can highlight those – without judgment!
- Refine your hypotheses for testing: Most GenAI use cases revolve around campaign content, but it’s also a valuable testing partner, especially in the all-important phase of creating valid hypotheses for the most useful results.
With all four use cases, you are feeding in your material and asking for help. You are not asking AI to do your thinking. Big difference!
Wrapping up: Let AI make you smarter, not smaller
I hope I’ve been clear that using AI is not a cheap dodge to avoid hard work. AI can take some of the drudgery out of day-to-day marketing, but it must serve you, your team, your brand, and your customers. Don’t use it to do the hard work of original thinking.
Using AI as a creative assistant instead of an automated creator can be a competitive differentiator, too. You might not see this pay off in the short run. But, as more companies let AI take the wheel, your originality will shine brighter, especially when crises arise and AI can’t help you.
Our goal, as always, should be scalable, insightful, and ethical messaging, with humans in the driver’s seat and AI as the capable assistant. Otherwise, you’re just producing noise at scale, and that doesn’t serve anybody.
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