Founder and CEO, Pulse Creative.
Throughout the past few years, I’ve observed that many people in the marketing world have moved past their initial worries about AI. A common theme I’m hearing these days? It isn’t that AI will take over, but rather that we’re moving toward incorporation.
I see AI as a fast, intuitive tool. But as marketers, how should we use it?
The Power Of AI In Marketing
AI has a lot of potential in the marketing realm, as long as it’s deployed effectively.
As I wrote in a previous article: “Preserving authenticity and real-world human experiences must always be the core of marketing and messaging.” AI can be used for purposes like streamlining workflows and brainstorming. It should not replace our creativity as marketers.
What The Numbers Reveal
If you’re keeping tabs on AI, you already know it’s making waves across the marketing sphere—and fast. The Marketing AI Institute’s “2024 State of Marketing AI Report,” which surveyed roughly 1,800 marketers and business leaders, found what I see as an astounding, but not surprising, statistic: “99% of respondents say they’re personally using AI.” According to CoSchedule’s “The State Of AI In Marketing 2025” report, “41.65% of marketers report that most or all of their existing tools have now added AI features and functionality in the last year.” Additionally, CoSchedule found that “28.24% of marketers report that AI has significantly enhanced their competitive edge.”
Many marketers are integrating AI into their workflows. According to a 2024 study by the Boston Consulting Group in partnership with Google, “about 20% of respondents have integrated AI tools deeply into their marketing workflows. They are testing AI-assisted decisions and personalization approaches in such areas as content creation, predictive analytics, and synthetic research methodologies.”
Many marketers are seeing results with AI while lowering costs. As the CoSchedule report I referenced earlier found, “43.46% report significant cost savings, attributing reduced overhead to AI’s automation and data processing features.” Additionally, CoSchedule uncovered that “marketers are effectively using AI to craft more targeted strategies, understand customer nuances, and ultimately achieve higher engagement and conversion rates, with Enhanced Personalization (42.02%) and Better Targeting (36.30%) also scoring high among the impactful outcomes of AI adoption.” The evidence shows that knowing how to strategically deploy AI can pay off. So, how can we marketers do so?
Curating The Right AI Toolkit
Here’s the catch: AI is only as good as your own vision. I’ve found that the most effective marketers never lean on a single tool. They curate a toolkit.
Marketing is a process. For my team and me, our strategic work begins long before we even think about content generation. We use Fathom’s AI notetaking tool to digest client calls and pull out pain points. Only then do LLMs like ChatGPT come into play—and not as a replacement for our writers, but rather as a springboard for brainstorming how to craft the client’s voice. On the design side, our designers might use Midjourney for initial concepts, jump to Adobe Firefly to build assets in Photoshop and then use Runway to bring a static image to life, complete with a custom soundtrack using Artlist AI. However, ultimately, it’s human intuition that directs all these moving parts to craft campaigns.
The tools I mentioned are what we’ve found work for us on my team. You don’t have to use the same tools we use. Instead, experiment! Find the tools that work best for you and your team. At the end of the day, the specific tools aren’t the most important factor. In my view, what matters most is how you use those tools and that you don’t treat them as replacements for human intuition.
Hybrid-Powered: AI Meets The Human Element
From my observations, the most forward-thinking agencies have already realized that success lies in a symbiotic relationship—AI’s technical horsepower amplifying human ingenuity. On its own, I think AI is great at what it’s designed to do: generate vast amounts of content, surface patterns from mountains of data and automate repetitive processes. But left unchecked, I find AI predictably mechanical. AI models learn patterns from past data and then replicate, refine and remix them. While that can enable scale, it can also lead to repetition.
If you’ve played with Midjourney or DALL-E, AI image generation tools, you’ve seen this firsthand. Sure, these tools can generate dozens of sleek logos or hundreds of image variations in seconds. But stare at them long enough, and the sameness creeps in—familiar lighting, unimaginative framing, predictable symmetry, etc. In my view, the magic isn’t in what AI produces on autopilot; it’s in what creatives do with it next.
Instead of handing the wheel to AI, marketers should sit in the driver’s seat and take charge. As marketers, we should curate, remix and refine, pulling the best AI has to offer and weaving it back into the human-led creative process. For example, Lexus famously used AI to write the script for its “Driven by Intuition” commercial, but it was an award-winning director who brought that script to life.
The Lexus example shows how AI can bring data-driven insights and speed to the table and how creatives can bring their unique skills and perspectives to mold what AI produces.
The symbiotic relationship between AI and people should permeate everything we do as marketers. We should let the machines handle the rote work so our team members can focus on the messy, beautiful and unpredictable work of creativity.
AI Is Our Pencil; We Are The Storytellers
I’ve always believed that AI isn’t here to replace us. I also think that AI is here to demand more from us as marketers. We need to sharpen what we can bring to the table: taste, timing and instinct.
From my perspective, the future winners in the marketing world won’t be the teams who let AI run the show. Rather, they’ll be the ones who know when to hit pause, assess the output and inject the human perspective that turns content into storytelling and data into experience. It is still up to us. I urge us to use AI, push it, break it—but never let it replace the human authenticity that makes us good at our jobs.
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