No, AI can’t do your marketing for you.

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DEEP DIVE
No, AI can’t do your marketing for you.

I’ve had more and more clients ask me the same thing lately:

“Can’t we just use AI to do X?”

And X is never something simple.

It’s not “rename these files” or “resize this image.”

It’s usually something that actually demands thinking and marketing creativity: coming up with a campaign angle, structuring an offer, writing sales copy, finding hooks, planning content that actually moves people.

That’s the gap I want to talk about here, because understanding it will help you use AI wisely in your business instead of blindly outsourcing your marketing brain to a tool.

For me, good marketing is a mix of two things:

• A deep understanding of your target audience

• Original thoughts and angles

You’re better than AI at marketing

AI can absolutely help with the first part, at least at the factual level.

I can fire up any LLM, upload a few avatar or “ideal client” docs, maybe some notes from past campaigns, and it will give me a decent breakdown of who we’re talking to:

• Demographics

• Surface-level pain points

• Common objections

• Goals and desires

That’s useful. It saves time. It gives me a quick starting point.

But it does not understand them the way you do.

It doesn’t sit on sales calls hearing the hesitation in someone’s voice.

It doesn’t see the frustration in a client’s face when they say “I’ve tried everything and nothing works.”

It doesn’t know the emotional context behind their problem.

And that emotional layer is usually what matters most when you’re trying to create marketing that “pattern interrupts” someone who’s half-asleep, doom-scrolling on Instagram.

That moment when they stop and think: “Wait. That’s me.”

That doesn’t come from facts. It comes from lived understanding.

The second part of good marketing is originality.

This is where most people feel the gap with AI.

Anyone who’s asked ChatGPT for “content ideas” has seen it firsthand.

You get a list that looks something like:

“10 Ways to Use AI in Your Business” or “How AI Is Transforming Marketing”

It’s not that the tool is broken. It’s doing exactly what it’s designed to do: average out patterns from everything it’s been trained on and give you the safest, most statistically likely answer.

That also means it gives you the most vanilla, predictable topics on earth.

This is where what I call the AI marketing illusion starts to creep in.

The AI marketing illusion (copywriting version)

Take copywriting as an example.

Before, most clients didn’t know how to write copy, and they knew they didn’t know. So they were happy to pay someone to write their sales page, their emails, their ads.

Now, they go to ChatGPT, paste a prompt like:

“Write a high-converting sales page for my online course…”

…and they get a full page of copy in seconds.

Compared to what they would’ve written themselves?

Yes, it’s probably better…

But that doesn’t mean it’s:

• The kind of copy that actually converts

• The kind that meets the reader exactly where they’re at

• The kind that feels eerily accurate, almost uncomfortably specific

There’s another problem too

If you don’t know copywriting, you also don’t really know what good copywriting looks like.

So the AI-generated version feels “good enough” simply because it’s more polished than your first draft. It looks like copy. It sounds like copy. It uses words like “transform” and “unlock” so your brain thinks, “Sure, that must be right.”

Meanwhile, people on the other side are getting savvier.

Most can spot AI-generated text pretty fast now, whether it’s in an email, a caption, or a blog post. The tone feels generic. The phrasing feels off. It reads like a template they’ve seen five times this week already.

And studies show a lot of people have a knee-jerk reaction at that point: they stop reading and close the tab. They feel like they’re being marketed to by a machine, not spoken to by a person.

Rant over…

I don’t want this to turn into some bitter “AI is ruining marketing” rant.

I use AI every day. I think you should too.

If you’re in charge of marketing at work or in your own business, it would be weird not to use it at this point.

The point I’m making is not “AI is bad.”

The point is: AI is not a replacement for the part where you think.

You can’t just hand it the keys to your marketing and disappear. That’s where the illusion becomes dangerous.

So let’s talk about where AI actually shines and how I like to use it.

The real model: you + AI, not AI instead of you

So here’s how I see it.

The win is not:

“AI will do my marketing so I can ignore it.”

The win is:

“I do the thinking. AI helps me move faster.”

You:

• Understand the market

• Talk to customers

• Make strategic decisions

• Come up with original angles

AI:

• Helps you research faster

• Helps you spot patterns

• Helps you organize and summarize

• Helps you edit, rewrite, and repurpose

It’s still you + tool.

And the moment you start expecting some kind of AI magic to replace the hard part of marketing (the part where you actually understand people and think for yourself) that’s when your marketing starts to feel like everyone else’s.