Marketing in the Age of AI Is a Crapshoot

A five-part series on what happens when everyone has access to a pretty good answer.

I use AI every day. And I'm increasingly convinced that marketing in the age of AI is a crapshoot. Not because AI isn't good enough.

Because it is.

Ask it for a marketing strategy and you'll get one. Complete with a target audience, positioning, key messages, channel recommendations, content ideas, and even KPIs. And it will all sound pretty good. That's what worries me.

I've spent most of my career developing strategies. And one thing I've learned is that a plausible strategy and a good strategy are not the same thing. Good strategy depends on context. On understanding what matters and what doesn't. On questioning assumptions, making choices, and sometimes recognizing that the obvious answer is obviously the wrong one.

AI has access to an extraordinary amount of marketing thinking. Books, articles, case studies, frameworks, experts, self-proclaimed experts, best practices and decades of conventional wisdom. Some of it is brilliant. Most of it isn't. Even so, AI is remarkably good at making both sound convincing.

That's the crapshoot.

AI can be enormously useful. It can expose possibilities, challenge assumptions, find connections and pressure-test ideas. I use it for all of those things. But I still have to know enough to recognize when the answer is wrong. Or ordinary. Or technically correct but strategically useless.

Maybe we're asking the wrong question. It’s not about how good AI will become at marketing. Perhaps it’s about how good marketers will need to become at using AI.
So over the next several posts, I'm going to look a little closer at that question:

1. When Good Enough Sounds Great. Why AI's ability to make almost anything sound credible changes what expertise means.

2. AI Has Made Answers Abundant. When answers become cheap, knowing which questions to ask becomes more valuable.

3. The Prompt Isn't the Expertise. A better prompt can improve the answer. It can't tell you whether you're solving the right problem.

4. Judgment Is the New Bottleneck. When ideas, analysis, and execution become abundant, choosing well becomes the scarce capability.

5. AI Is Better as a Sparring Partner Than an Oracle. Perhaps the best use of AI isn't asking it what to think, but using it to make your own thinking better.

I'm not particularly worried that AI will make good marketers obsolete. Mediocre ones may be another story. Because when anyone can generate a competent strategy, write a decent brief, develop a dozen ideas, or produce a polished presentation in minutes, simply being competent isn't much of an advantage anymore.

AI raises the floor.

People who know how to question the answer, recognize what others miss, and exercise judgment will matter more than ever. Maybe AI doesn't diminish expertise. It just makes real expertise easier to see. And that seems worth taking a closer look.