Should you replace your marketing team with AI?

Too much of the current discourse is on eliminating humans. 10x marketers use AI as an assistant, never to delegate entirely.

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We don’t need a copywriter anymore. We have ChatGPT.

I heard this from a technical founder last year. The quote “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” came to mind. In the founder’s defence, I don’t think he’s alone in this thinking. And I don’t think it's unique to marketing.

There’s a common experience I’ve witnessed from people using AI

1. Try a new AI tool in a domain outside of their expertise

2. Get to the “aha” moment. Find it amazing and magical

3. Conclude that professionals in that domain are doomed

4. Take to social media to share the above (how fun those posts are to read 🙄)

Not much is shared about what happens next. But I’ve seen it happen time and time again. The inflated expectations are inevitably met with a trough of disillusionment as soon as it becomes evident that AI needs guardrails.

After going through the first three steps above (countless times), I’ve concluded that the third bullet needs adjusting. Concluding that average professionals in that domain are doomed is more accurate. Those in the top tier, who have a mastery that makes them seem like wizards to everyone else, will be the ones who will become superhuman when using the right tools.

Why? Because they know where to set the guardrails. They know when to zoom in and out. I’ll make a bold prediction here: The era of the T-shaped marketer is ending. Being OK in multiple marketing domains is something we can delegate to AI. What’s harder to delegate? True mastery. ChatGPT can’t replace a world-class copywriter. It can replace an average one.

Let’s take Joanna Wiebe, for example. Joanna is a world-class copywriter and the founder of Copyhackers. Last year, I attended one of her talks, “AI copywriting frameworks for startups,” where she gave a masterclass.

Here is how she uses AI to help her write copy:

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• Analysis: She uses it to analyse and categorise customer data, such as datasets from customer surveys.

• Segmentation: She then uses the data analysis on her customer data to help her decide ‘what to say’ and ‘how to say it’, creating segments to explore.

• Ideation: She uses it to help her brainstorm examples for ads and create rough first drafts, which helps to get ideas flowing.

• Ordering: AI helps to order ideas based on specific copywriting frameworks that she’s created and uses herself.

• Checks: AI helps her figure out ad outlines & checks against Meta’s ad rules for compliance.

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But she always writes the final copy. AI is her assistant, not her thinker. She’s still the one accountable for the final outcome.

Note how it’s not as simple as delegating to AI and calling it a day. 10x copywriters and content marketers use AI to increase the depth of their knowledge, deepen their insights and accelerate their output. But they wag AI’s tail, not the other way around.

Here’s five practical ways that 10x content marketers use to scale themselves with AI¹:

Wrap up

10x content marketers are super close to the customer and deeply understand their pains, which they turn into relevant messages. Only then can they produce content and operate at scale with AI.

But they are not your single marketing machine. A 10x content marketer can be a master at copy but won’t be able to replicate this scale in design or UX: they don’t know the guardrails.

They dominate in their niche: content. They can leverage tools and scale themselves. But they are not a ‘one-person marketing band’.

To conclude, if you think you can replace your marketing team with AI based on what you’ve seen on social media, think again.

1. The best 10x content tools I use are:
- To automate - Make.com
- To find content ideas & ideate - Inboundr.ai ; Feedly
- To analyse - for performance Shield.app or Claude for large datasets & visualisations
- To build templates - canva.com
- To test hooks - ChatGPT