Twenty-Five Years In, AI Showed Me What I'm Worth

You can spin up a marketing agent, and it'll land with the same impact as a real marketing professional would. That's the belief floating around about AI and marketing right now. It won't. Nope. Nada. And I'm saying that as someone who's worked with AI for years, and the past eight months freelancing with these tools open in front of me every day.

This isn't me telling you AI is overrated.

I love what it does. It generates a brief in moments, takes some knotty technical subject and explains it in plain language faster than I can pour a coffee, and pulls me out of writer's block when I've been staring at a blank page too long. It throws viewpoints at me I wouldn't have reached on my own. Across the campaigns I've built over my career, nothing has helped me produce more in less time than this. The table stakes are real, and I'm not going back.

But here's what we've all learned. AI makes mistakes. More than I can count, and the gap between "looks done" and "is done" is a big part of my job now.

Here's a recent example.

I used Claude to build out an event lifecycle campaign, and it was useful for getting the general pieces in place, the structure, the cadence, the scaffolding I'd otherwise spend an afternoon on. Then I read it the way I've learned to read everything. It had the audience wrong. The message was incomplete. It had no feel for the geographical impact, which mattered enormously for this particular event. And it kept matching solutions to needs in a way that looked plausible but wasn't right. Every one of those sat confidently on the page. None were correct, and the tool had no idea. So I rebuilt the audience, the message, and the regional angle. That reworked version is the one we ran, and it's putting real prospects in front of the team right now, the kind of conversations that turn into business.

So I dig. I catch where the messaging needs to stretch into real thought leadership rather than circling the same safe ideas that keep AI stuck. I fact-check, I chase down sources, and I keep asking the questions I've been asking myself for twenty-five years. Does this resonate with the person reading it? Do they care? What do we want them to walk away believing, and what should they do next?

Those questions don't come from a prompt. They come from a quarter century of watching campaigns land, watching them flop, and sitting with the uncomfortable work of figuring out why one moved people into the funnel, and the other didn't. You build that instinct slowly, the way you build any craft worth having.

Which brings me to the part that worries me.

My biggest fear for the people coming up in this profession is that they'll hide behind the tools. That they'll mistake speed for skill and let agents do the thinking. The things that make a marketer, AI can't give you. Understanding the customer lifecycle. Putting yourself in the buyer's shoes. Talking to people openly and honestly, building real relationships, networking your way to a truth no dashboard will ever show you. You can't automate your way into the buyer's seat. You have to choose to sit in it.

When everyone can produce decent work in seconds, decent work stops being the differentiator. What's left is judgment. Taste. The willingness to ask whether the thing we're making deserves anyone's attention. The people worth hiring right now aren't the ones who move fastest. They're the ones who use AI to get closer to the customer instead of hiding from the hard work.

I'm not competing with AI. I'm using it for workflows and automation so I can spend my time on the work that needs a human in the room: the judgment, the relationships, the read on what a buyer actually needs.

I've spent twenty-five years learning to sit in the buyer's seat. AI didn't make that obsolete. It made it rare. That's the work I want to keep doing, and I'm having more fun doing it than I have in years.