I know it’s easy to feel intimidated by AI or to simply say “eh. I’ll figure it out later” but the truth is unless you’ve been blissfully unaware every company, every worker, every person has been talking about AI. What is it? How they can use it? I’ve heard many founders and CEO’s of early stage startups talk about how if they aren’t incorporating AI into their business investors don’t even want to have a conversation about giving them money.
So yeah, as much as it feels daunting, it’s a must that you start thinking about AI in a real way. I can also promise you as you start talking to more clients they will want to know your opinions on specific LLM’s, AI software and how you are using AI to help your own business. Your answer to that can’t be “Nah, AI ain’t for me.” Because you have to be ready for that conversation the same way you were for Facebook, Instagram, SEO, and every other latest tool and audience builder.
Understand What AI Is Actually Doing Behind the Curtain
You don’t need to write code to be AI-literate, but you do need to understand how it works. AI in advertising isn’t magic—it’s math. It optimizes spend through probabilistic models, predicts conversions using vast data sets, and segments audiences based on real-time behavior patterns.
It’s crucial to distinguish between automation and intelligence. Automation replaces repetitive tasks. Intelligence amplifies strategy. The marketer's job is no longer to pull levers, but to know which levers matter.
This is especially true in your own business function. There’s the tools like fireflies which help record meetings and synthesize notes. Then there’s the use of AI to take 6 months worth of audience signals and help recognize patterns. As with any new tool AI isn’t foolproof but it’s exceptional when it comes to cutting through the noise of your day to day functions and helping you make decisions.
Build Data Fluency, Not Just Data Access
Every marketer has dashboards. Fewer know how to interpret them. Being "data-driven" means more than knowing the numbers—it means interrogating them. What is the model optimizing for? Which inputs are biased? What signals does the system prioritize, and are they aligned with your actual goals?
Upskilling here doesn’t mean learning SQL. It means sharpening your critical thinking. Tools will keep evolving. Your ability to ask smarter questions needs to evolve faster.
A good example of how to use AI here in a very basic way: you’ve been there where a client or a business wants all the numbers. Literally all of them even though you know that they probably don’t know what to do with half of them because the dirty little secret is you don’t know what to do with them either.
So now you can take those same sets of numbers and data points and feed them to your AI. If you know how to ask smart questions you can get really smart responses from the AI.
“Take a look at these sets of numbers. Here are the objectives of this company. Then tell me what data points are most useful to help sharpen our objectives and achieve them.” It’s a simple prompt and you’ll get a better more useful prompt when talking about your specific client but this should allow the AI to figure out how to take the numbers that matter and help you understand how they matter.
You can then take that information and bring that back to the client. “This is the dashboard we should be building.”
Reclaim the Human Edge: Strategy, Storytelling, Judgment
AI can generate thousands of ad variations, but it can’t decide what your brand stands for. It can test for performance, but it can’t create resonance.
Now more than ever, human marketers need to lean into what only humans can do: craft compelling narratives, time a message perfectly, understand the cultural moment, and exercise strategic judgment. The best marketers won’t compete with machines—they’ll guide them.
A client of mine does podcasts as one content engine of their business. We ended up creating a custom GPT with all the podcast transcripts loaded into the GPT and then used to help brainstorm great content ideas and set up first drafts. AI is very good at the bones of your content but the personalized stories and the emotional appeal are things that are best coming from you.
This article you’re reading right now is AI outlined and Mike Cahill written. That’s the best way to do it. Learn how to make your AI a writing assistant. They can help see gaps in your content. They can identify patterns in the content that resonates with customers.
Learn to Ask Better Questions, Not Just Build Better Campaigns
AI works best with clarity. If you can’t articulate the outcome you’re optimizing for, you won’t get results—you’ll get noise.
Strategic prompting, hypothesis framing, scenario planning—these are the new power moves. Don’t just launch campaigns. Shape learning agendas. Every interaction with AI is an opportunity to refine your strategy.
A great example I’ve found is being very intentional with the AI you’re working with. “We are looking to solve for this. Here are the internal discussions we’re having and the crossroads we are at. Take me through a few different scenarios if we go with options A, B and C.”
The key here is that you cannot be lazy with the prompts. AI can only figure out so much on limited information. It’s no different than you. If a client says to me “help my ads on Google to perform better” that’s less than 10% of the information I need. The more context I have the better.
Don’t skimp on the prompt. Be detailed, define as much as you can.
Get Comfortable in the Pilot’s Seat
AI can drive, but it needs a human navigator. That means understanding tools like Meta Advantage+ or Google’s Performance Max, not just using them. Don’t hand over the keys without knowing how the engine works.
Stay curious. Experiment. Toggle between control and automation. The marketers who win won’t be the ones who "set and forget" – they’ll be the ones who test, learn, and lead.
This point is crucial. You cannot just leave it to the AI. If you’ve seen Google’s AI Overviews or even had AI lead a big project for you you should have found numerous errors. I once fed it data for my kids jelly bean experiment and found the data to be wildly off and had my son turned in some of those graphs and charts sight unseen it would have been embarrassing for him.
You have to use AI as an assistant. Also as a marketing your ability to use these tools effectively will make you an asset to companies. There’s going to be a knowledge gap for quite a while around people who want to use AIs but don’t really know how and those who know how to. Those who know how will win.
Conclusion: The Marketer’s Role Isn’t Shrinking—It’s Evolving
My advice is start with smaller tasks, smaller data dumps, smaller insights and decision making. Take AI for a test drive on a daily basis to see how it does. Part of the mission here is to find out where AI can best steer you. Maybe you see yourself as an expert decision maker and so you really just need it for helping you with creative or analyzing numbers.
Take it for a test drive and see how it does.
