“One of the things that worries us in the industry is seeing how excited everyone is about AI to save time and money. Everyone thinks that’s their advantage. It’s not. It’s just a disadvantage not to do that.” - Tom Ollerton, Founder of Automated Creative
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, artificial intelligence (AI) has gone from something to play with to an everyday marketing tool.
But just because we can use AI, should we?
We know that brands are using AI in marketing. HubSpot’s 2026 State of Marketing Report says that 80% of marketers are using AI for content creation and 75% for media production.
So, the real question isn’t about whether we do or don’t. It’s about how we use it without sacrificing the craft that makes great marketing effective: creativity, strategic thinking and human connection.
Most creatives want to spend their time creating, not uploading 300 posts across social channels, resizing and scheduling.
And that’s one of AI's biggest strengths for marketers. Those time-consuming tasks that take you away from doing what you do best can be automated and taken off your plate.
Rather than replacing you, using AI in your marketing gives you more time to focus on strategic thinking and creative problem-solving – what you were hired to do. For smaller teams, it allows them to produce content at scale and compete with bigger players in their market.
Marketing teams can now analyse performance data easily, repurpose long-form content into social media snippets faster and maintain consistent brand tone across departments and countries.
It gives marketers time back to create the stuff that genuinely makes a difference to brands, and that you love.
The power of data and AI in marketing means that the next time someone tells you they have a “gut feeling” about your next campaign, you can stop them in their tracks.
This is something that smaller marketing teams have especially struggled with. The lack of a dedicated analytics manager or team has meant that detailed data has been…well…completely absent. So, a gut feeling is as good as nothing, right?
Now, thanks to AI, whether it's analysing customer behaviour, forecasting campaign performance or uncovering trends, marketing teams can analyse large datasets, explore new audiences and see what good looks like for (perhaps for the first time…) at lightning speed.
That means decisions aren’t guesswork and ad campaign results are more likely to be positive.
Our own internal data reflects this. Across the board, we added £30M in value to our clients’ campaigns through data analysis and increased video completion rates by 16%.
It's also helping marketers to experiment. Rather than asking “Which campaign got us the clicks?”, you can now start asking “Why did it get the clicks?” and test ad campaigns to help you understand what is genuinely driving business growth.
64% of consumers want brands to connect with them, and personalisation is key to that. But that’s also been out of reach for smaller marketing teams.
Segmentation is time-consuming without AI, but with it? Marketers can tailor messaging, recommendations and journeys to individual consumers rather than broad demographic segments.
That’s a huge shift away from the marketing persona era, and AI means that personalisation really can be personal. Marketers can start engaging with individual consumers, each with their own context, priorities and purchasing behaviours.
This level of personalisation would have been almost impossible to achieve manually just a few years ago, but now, it’s real.
Platforms like Meta increasingly reward creative variation over audience targeting alone. For marketers, that means you’re no longer producing one campaign with one creative execution; you need multiple headlines, visuals, hooks and calls-to-action.
That’s an added workload to already stretched-out (and stressed) teams.
But AI-assisted marketing production makes this possible. Existing creative can be modified in minutes to fulfil the insatiable needs of ad platforms and provide invaluable data and feedback on what worked and what didn’t.
Creative testing is an opportunity for marketers to learn and grow, but it shouldn’t cost you your sanity. AI enables marketers to test hypotheses and variations rapidly, learning faster and gaining a competitive advantage without a side serving of stress.
You’ve heard this before: put average in, get average out. And it’s no different with AI. AI is trained on existing content, so if that’s average, then…you get the idea.
Relying on AI in marketing without engaging in critical thinking means that ad campaigns run the risk of becoming indistinguishable from each other and brands increase the potential of diluting their distinctiveness.
“Instead of making brands more distinctive, AI is actually pushing everyone towards the same middle of the road ideas.” – Neil Patel, How the Best Marketers Actually Use AI (Hint: It's Not a Prompt)
As more businesses generate similar content from similar tools, there’s a real chance that differentiation becomes increasingly difficult.
Memorable marketing has never been built on average ideas, so using AI to generate content from scratch increases the chance that original thinking will be pushed out of the creative process.
Sure, AI can generate your copy, images and campaign suggestions in seconds.
But what it can’t do is understand cultural nuance, emerging social movements or emotional context in the same way that you can. It’s also been programmed by people, which means it contains some serious design flaws.
“Biases make their way into AI outputs and decision-making through its training data, algorithm, or human interpretation. When biased outputs are accepted and shared without reflection, we risk making stereotypes and prejudices look like the norm.” – University of Edinburgh
Marketing isn't just about producing content. Marketers need to recognise why a conversation matters today, understand subtle shifts in consumer behaviour and create ideas that genuinely resonate.
It’s also about challenging what is thrown out at us, so that we don’t contribute to perpetuating stereotypes, and can bring empathy and reflection into the process.
Using AI in marketing has the potential to create content that damages your brand reputation.
Sad news, but consumers aren’t going to buy from your brand simply because you’re efficient with your marketing. They don’t care.
What they do care about is trust. Fashion brand Mango started using AI in its marketing to generate models and clothes in 2024 but quickly faced backlash from consumers who pointed out their ads gave them no idea what the clothes were like in real life or how they would fit.
AI can, and does, support communications and your advertising, but so many customer-facing interactions require authenticity, empathy and judgement. Something that AI can’t do, but you can.
Marketers need to continue to decide whether AI produced content genuinely reflects your brand's values and tone of voice.
One concern is that AI risks dumbing-down marketing skills in three areas:
Over-dependence on AI in marketing risks losing the ability to question its recommendations or recognise when it's wrong.
Marketers need to ask: "Would I still know how to do this without AI?" If the answer is no, it's worth reconsidering how much responsibility you've delegated.
Creativity is a muscle we need to flex. If you don’t put in the reps, then you risk never developing the critical skills that help brands truly differentiate themselves.
Marketers are going to need to become the gatekeepers of authenticity. Handing over routine production, reporting and administration to automation can enable you to truly protect your craft and the skills that make you valuable.
Multi-cloud networking and security company Aviatrix managed to automate 80% of its marketing work. Imagine what you could achieve if your focus was on the 20% of creative work that makes your brand distinctive and valued your unique, human skills?
When used well, AI in marketing supports smarter decision-making and helps marketers spend more time on high-value work (and the stuff you actually like doing).
Brands need to focus on knowing when to let AI lead and when to rely on human skills.
AI should amplify great marketing, not replace the thinking that makes that great marketing possible.