Beyond The AI Hype Train And Helping Marketers Win AI
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This is my most recent conference presentation, cutting through the noise of AI to know how to win.
Current State of AI (Phase 1): AI is still in its early stages ("Crawl" phase, with "Walk" expected by 2026), and while it's good and getting better, current promises often require significant work and investment. LLMs cannot predict the future, don't fully understand data in context or apply logic, and are essentially "guessing" rather than understanding.
Key AI Considerations: AI revolves around 3T’s "Time - Trust - Truth." As I recently said on The AI Moment podcast its Validate and Verify. AI can save time and energy and help re-point talent, but questions of trust in answers, platforms, and data privacy, as well as the truthfulness and verifiability of output, are crucial.
AI as Answer Engines: Google (with Gemini) and Microsoft are moving towards "answer engine" from traditional search engines and automated creation interfaces, beyond the traditional search surfaces.
Cautionary Tales of AI: There have been instances of AI backlash, such as Coca-Cola's AI-generated Christmas ads and the negative reception of AI influencers (Virtual Influencers or VIs), which have been linked to negative scenarios and decreased brand trust.
Brand Play AI Slop? I pose the question in the rise of "AI slop" (with AI-only social media content and apps) do brands know where they live and where they play?
Evolution of Social Media Feeds: Social media feeds are shifting from primarily "connected" content (friends, family) to overwhelmingly "unconnected" content (90% by 2025-2027) based on habits and engagement, with a default public view. We also have an opportunity know to do more across social and arguably with vibe coding, more chances to create richer, more engaging experiences
The Numerous Opportunities for Brands with AI: AI presents opportunities for digital avatars, real-life experiences, private groups, custom gamification, rewards, company mascots, digital personas, expert bots, and guessing games, with a predicted return to platform-based games.
Real-Life AI Workflow Improvements: AI can significantly streamline marketing processes, reducing the time from problem identification to solution implementation from days/months to a single sprint, particularly in data analysis and optimisations.
ChatGPT Referral Growth: ChatGPT is becoming a significant driver of referral traffic for major retailers like Walmart, Etsy, Target, and eBay - this will evolve but with publishers struggling for traffic, it is interesting to see stores and supermarkets doing so well and being reward with clicks.
Inspiration from AI Stacks: My friend Katie (from standout AI company Veed.io) shared her AI stack on Linkedin - it’s her real-world example that show how savvy and great Product Marketers are leveraging AI tools (e.g., Claude, Manus, Granola, VEED, ChatGPT, Figma, Zapier, Gemini, Midjourney) to amplify strategic thinking and drastically reduce time spent on tasks like competitor analysis, launch messaging, and customer insights synthesis.
AI "Newsroom" Approach: I present my concept of an "AI Newsroom" as a winning strategy for smart Marketing departments, integrating AI into amplification, algorithmic processes, PR, social media, content, paid media, SEO/AEO, and direct contact.
Where Organisations Are With AI: Most organisations are in the "AI Experimentation" or "AI Enablement" phase, with C-suites demanding "AI Adoption" quickly. Many think they are further along than they actually are, and some are still stuck in "Hype/Fear."
Human + AI Collaboration: Examples like AI-generated podcasts demonstrate a human-plus-AI approach where AI assists with content creation while human teams provide outlines, final checks, and add elements like music.
Always Overlooked! AI for Internal Use: AI is unlocking and enabling internal operations through improved quality (not just quantity), custom internal tools, better knowledge sharing, enhanced internal communications, and empowering specialists to perform like generalists, bringing marketing closer to growth, product, and finance. Examples I included; automated stand-ups and AI-enhanced QBRs.
More AI for External Use Cases: AI is being used externally for automated meeting scheduling (e.g., Lindy.ai), automating podcast-to-blog post and social media workflows (using tools like Riverside, Descript, Gemini, Agent.ai), RSS to newsletter summarization, customer feedback analysis, predictive impact scoring for creative campaigns (e.g. Kellanova), and generating various content formats from existing material.
Marketing Unfiltered Report: I leveraged AI to analyse our Marketing Unfiltered 2030 Marketing Report from 130 CMOs, saving hours on analysis, sanity checks, and editorial review. Key insights from the report include the expectation of new AI-related roles, AI automating tactical tasks and speeding up creative production, and the primary value of AI being efficiency, speed, and automation. CMOs expect AI to make most tactical decisions by 2030, but less so for creative design. Channels expected to increase in importance include GEO, Events, Partnerships, Social, and OOH, while SEO, TV, PPC, Email, and Print are expected to decrease.
The 2025-2026 Distribution Strategy: Trusting internal experts, showcasing developers and operations leaders, embracing "no-more-over-polish" screen recordings, having multiple official spokespeople, and understanding when other departments can market better are key strategies inspired by AI companies.
Rethinking Marketing Communication: AI is enabling a shift from "One To All" broadcast marketing to more personalised "One To One," "One To Few," and "One To Many" (group-based) approaches. But can AI help those companies who just don’t know how to do hyper personalised content and then know how to go back up to group comms…
Reshaping Marketing Departments: AI will lead to new full-funnel roles, reframing of existing roles, and reshaping of teams and departments with more cross-functional collaboration (Operations, Community/Audience, Product).
Potential New Marketing Categories: For marketing specifically, AI can lead to a new way of working and collaborating - including my new breakdown of teams under Brand, Performance, Amplification, and Distribution umbrella’s.
Agentic Workflows: The document introduces the concept of "agentic" workflows, where AI agents can perform tasks autonomously, potentially reshaping roles like Marketing Ops, Content Editor, CRM, and Product Marketing by 2026-2027.
Agentic B2B Workflow Optimisations: This also extends to the buyer journey, where AI agents can assist with searches, comparisons, negotiations, and simulated trials. We have to question whether our team members will want work requests (like tasks) to be completed by bots and then will they accept a bot telling the team members what to do next…
AI ROI in 2026: My deck focuses and emphasises that 2026 needs to be the year of AI ROI, moving beyond productivity gains to measurable conversions and revenue, as CFOs will not tolerate indiscriminate spending on AI tools and there will be shorter leases for tech teams burning through credits .
Inspiration for Better Marketing & AI: Practical applications for AI include quick landing pages, highly personalised pages, automated event management, churn reduction, improved content, automated A/B testing, bespoke customer journey mapping, customised discount codes, custom gamification, dashboards with analysis, and auto-analytics.
Here are some of the Q&A from today:
You mentioned cautionary tales such as Coca-Cola's AI ad backlash and negative perceptions of AI influencers. How can Marketing teams ensure they leverage AI for creativity and efficiency without alienating their audience or damaging brand trust, particularly as "AI slop" likely becomes more prevalent?
Have high-quality brand guidelines - which coach the team, not police them
On my AI Moment podcast, we recommend an AI Manifesto, leaning towards having a quality barrier, increasing from good enough content to good. Have specific guidelines and policies that drive the best decisions
Does it pass the mum test (will she spot it?) and does it pass my worst colleagues’ test (will they spot it and run around the office saying they used AI, look how bad it is or misleading it is)
If you need to: Test the AI content out on a customer panel, test it on social or leak it and see reactions - this year might have more leeway than next. Be mindful, if it looks fake, it will be called out quickly…
The presentation suggests a significant reshaping of marketing roles and departments, moving towards semi-funnel roles and potentially "Agentic Departments." What are the most critical skills marketers need to develop right now to thrive in these evolving structures, and how can companies best support this upskilling?
Go from know-it-all to → learn-it-all mentality
Understand how AI can help you, not hinder you, think more like your agent, not just an assistant (or being your replacement)
If you are a specialist, you will have to decide if you are a specialist and going up to expert or going from specialist to generalist, which I predict will happen to great Marketing and Growth people
Understand where you are uniquely good at something that cannot be easily replicated, PQ (political intelligence) or EQ (emotional intelligence) and relationships and scale this further
Write down your skillsets, run a professional SWOT on yourself, ask for feedback and then highlight what you need to improve or learn new skills and where you need to defend skills and put in a business case for L&D
What’s the future of websites? Are they being replaced by LLM chat or agentic browsers?
Websites are going to be around for the long term, so you have to understand how important it is for you to build it as a home and hub and create education, inspiration or entertainment through the website
You do not want to be in a place where it’s just agents or LLM chats - it’s another filtering and algorithm game for you to lose, and only some will win.
Yes - consider and ramp up how you will appear in LLM chat and for agentic workflows and agents, but really think deeply about experience on and around your site. Anyone considered a brand and a destination is going to win while customers and consumers cross the chasm
Always think customer and consumer experiences over bot and agentic - it will connect and cross over, what is good for customers and humans will be good for bots and agents as we usually build agents and bots to replicate our behaviours
Read my take on why AI Ads have to become experiences and bespoke outcomes not just more click ads unit!
Links in the presentation
This is the NFL AI ad included in the presentation
Below is how Google NotebookLM summarised my deck into a 6 minute video, pretty good job, take a watch