AI won't kill marketing (and here's why)

There are HUGE misconceptions right now that need clarification, especially those about AI completely replacing marketers.?Tropes like, “Marketers: watch out for your job, AI is coming!”

Before I founded Jacquard , I was a brand-side marketer, and with both these experiences in mind, here are some of the things I’ve learned about building AI products for marketers:

Some technologists make the classic mistake of focusing on a single marketing task (like automating ad copy), then jump to pervasive conclusions based on that task alone (“we should automate all marketing activities”).

The reality is that oversimplifying marketing, a highly nuanced and strategic field, down to a few tasks… is unwise overreach.

Here are some things that you would only learn by building an AI company WITH and FOR marketers, rather than building something just because it’s technically possible:

?? Marketers aren't just using surface-level insights. They work with a deep understanding of consumer psychology, market trends, and brand positioning. An AI may be able to generate content at the click of a button… but understanding the subtleties of a target audience… and whether or not the content is good… is far more difficult, and requires a nuanced application of AI, not just broad brush strokes.

?? Marketers rely on a range of heuristics for decision making, honed over years of experience and diverse situations, and one of their key initial determinations is whether something feels "off" about the campaign or brand perception. AI algorithms are not able to mimic that task.

?? Like doctors diagnosing a rare condition, marketers, because they have a well-rounded understanding of their brand and audience, can often identify unique trends or shifts in consumer behaviour after seeing it ONLY ONCE. Mimicking this intuition in an AI model is a complex (and likely technically impossible) challenge.

?? There are more ways AI can assist marketers rather than outright replacing them. I've worked with thousands of marketers over my career; the vast majority want repetitive work replaced, not creative or strategic work.?Trying to replace the latter results in an adversarial climate where no one wins.

?? A large part of a marketer's job is *internal* communication - with sales, finance, operations or other departments. If you're considering automating marketers’ roles, you need to understand and replicate these intricate interactions, which are often unique to each company.

?? Every company has a unique data structure, access to which may not be uniform. Therefore, a generalized algorithm might not be universally applicable. Worse, pretraining from public datasets might not even be possible due to the specific nature of your own company’s customers and business model.

?? Have you ever tried to launch a new platform in a marketing department? The whole modern marketing process is optimized to prevent any damage to brand image - even if you have a sophisticated AI tool, the hurdles to adoption given the lack of trust in blind AI systems are significant, and are only slowly overcome.

?? For each application of AI in marketing, there's a vast amount of specific and UNKNOWABLE domain knowledge.?This is the secret sauce that you can try to bottle, but the bottle is never as good as the stuff you make from scratch.

Simply put: pure technologists often overlook the nuances of marketing, and the intricacies of implementation... leading them to underestimate the complexity of practical applications.

But it's solutions the small details that really add value to AI platforms, particularly in a domain as emotive as marketing.

So, marketers: should you worry about advanced AI tools disrupting traditional marketing methods?

Probably.

Should you be alarmed that AI will replace human marketers and devastate the industry single-handedly?

Absolutely not. And if anyone tells you different: chances are, they are talking out of their a(i)ss.