Less doing, more thinking: The future of AI in marketing.

A bloke walks into a bar. He said “ouch”. It was an iron bar. Not really. But stay with me.

Because we're all walking into the AI Bar right now. The bar is called AI. And everyone's acting like the place is going to burn down.

Remember when everyone thought AI was going to steal all the marketing jobs? That was yesterday. Today, 91% of marketers think AI will actually create MORE jobs.

What changed? People stopped panicking long enough to actually think.

The chef at the pass

Ever been to a Michelin-starred restaurant? The head chef doesn't cook your dinner. He / she stands at the pass. Checks everything before it goes out. The ‘grunt work’ (prepping veg, making sauces etc) is done by the kitchen staff.

The head chef assesses the presentation, the look and the layout on the plate. That's his job. To ensure consistency and the perfect delivery of his / her vision.

That's what marketers need to become. Let AI do the cooking. You do the checking.

The problem with doing

ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity and Claude changed everything. Not because they're clever enough in isolation, but because they normalised AI. Made it accessible. Suddenly every marketeer could automate the boring stuff. Choose audiences. Write copy. Test subject lines.

All the 'doing' tasks that filled up the day. The stuff that stopped you thinking.

57% of marketers want AI that optimises. 53% want it to automate. They're not lazy. They're smart. Because once the machine does the doing, you can actually do your job. Which is thinking.

What AI can't do (yet)

Lynn Girotto at Vimeo said something interesting. She's fascinated by AI understanding human behaviour. Because that's what marketing is. Understanding people.

AI can process billions of data points about what people do. But it can't feel what makes us human. That bit's still ours. The emotional journey. The shared experience. The thing that makes someone choose you over the 47 other brands selling the same product. AI can analyse. We have to empathise.

The sea of ‘sameness’…

Here's the danger. Everyone gets the same AI. Everyone asks it to write email subject lines. Everyone gets similar results. Suddenly every brand sounds the same. You're drowning in a sea of sameness.

That's why you need someone experienced at the pass in the restaurant. Someone who remembers life before the internet. When brands had to work harder to be different. When a human lens mattered.

Let AI generate 50 options. You pick the one that doesn't sound like a robot wrote it. Big London agencies typically use AI to start the ball rolling and then hand over to their copy writers and art directors to try to “beat AI”.

Individual everything

The promise is individual marketing. Right message, right time, right person. I've been saying this for 35 years. Now we might actually be able to do it.

Because AI can handle millions of individual experiences simultaneously. Treating everyone like a VIP. But here's what people miss. Technology enables it.

Humans still have to design it. (At the moment…)

You still need to understand what makes each customer tick. What they care about. What keeps them up at night. What ‘buttons to press’ in their minds. AI can optimise the delivery in dozens of useful time-consuming ways. But you have to create the meaning.

Trust, but verify

Ashley Kramer at Open AI gets it. AI isn't a threat. It's an enhancer. But you need guardrails. The best way to build trust? Transparency. AI is a ladder - stack it and re-frame the prompts: Show how the AI made its decision. Let marketers override it when it's wrong.

Because often, it will be incorrect. Not always. But sometimes. And when an algorithm gets marketing wrong, it gets it really wrong. That's why you still require the chef at the pass. To check it before it goes out.

The new job description

So what does a marketer not do now? Less choosing audiences from dropdown menus. Less writing the 47th version of an email subject line. Less staring at spreadsheets wondering which segment converts better. Less A/B/C testing.

More understanding what your customers actually need. More designing experiences that matter. More creating emotional connections that make people choose you. Algorithms handle the DRAG. You (or we) look after soul.

Learning to learn

42% of marketers are extremely concerned about needing to learn AI. Good. That means they're paying attention. But here's the thing:

You don't need to become a data scientist. You need to become a better marketer. AI is just a tool. Like a calculator. You still need to know what problem you're solving. The math gets easier.

The thinking makes everything better. AI affords you the time to think.

The bottom line

Marketing isn't dying. It's being reborn. All the boring operational stuff that stopped us being creative? Gone. All the time we spent on strategy? Back.

But only if we're smart about it.

Let AI do what it's good at. Processing data. Testing variations. Optimising delivery. The MIT Monk on YouTube summed this up perfectly in an acronym: DRAG: Use AI for drafting, research, analysis and grunt work – e.g. cleaning and standardising data.

You do what you're good at. Understanding people. Creating meaning. Building brands. Put everything under a human lens. Less doing. More thinking. That's not a threat. That's an opportunity.

The best marketing was never about ‘the doing’ anyway. It was always about the thinking. Now we all finally have time to do it properly.

Be More Cheetah utilise the best aspects of AI to deliver campaigns at scale much faster and much more effectively.

But I still see AI headlines and think: “I could do better than that.”

Call me on 07974 179899 - I know - "call me" - unheard of in 2026...

Marco Pierre Fairhurst (Steve)

Chef at the pass since 1989.