By Greg Peters

AI is the biggest jolt of energy marketing has felt since the internet. Rather than fear it, smart operators will grab it and ride the wave.

In the Mad Men era of the 1960s, marketing lived in the boardroom, born from creative conversations and driven by strategy. The internet’s arrival in the mid-1990s flipped that world, pushing marketers from shaping big ideas to managing tactics like SEO, banner ads, pop-ups and content mills. Now AI is here, and the shifts feel constant. At a breakneck pace, it’s commoditizing once-core marketing tactics, doing the work so effectively that public opinion assumes machines can replace marketers.

Here’s where the pressure amps up: Clients and executives often don’t care how the work gets done, as long as it’s completed on time and within budget. You can manage revenue, risk, cost and cash flow however you see fit, as long as the numbers move in the right direction.

For some, that sounds terrifying and like a sure sign AI will decimate the creative process and eliminate jobs. But I’m here to tell you that this isn’t the end. You’re not going to lose your job to AI. But you could lose your job to someone who knows how to use it.

Creative Resistance And Adoption

You can see the resistance to AI playing out in the talent market. Countless writers have “open to work” on their LinkedIn profiles. The perceived value of writing has been eroded, hitting marketing intensely. AI makes tactics easier to access, so agencies and professionals must demonstrate that their work drives outcomes beyond what a tool can produce.

Those of us using AI daily know marketing has never stopped being valuable. Agencies need to demonstrate their value through tangible results. Smart AI adoption combined with expertise delivers faster, lasting outcomes. Understandably, the resistance often comes from creatives who are hesitant to adopt new tools out of fear.

I’ve always been a late tech adopter, but even I use ChatGPT. I rely on it for decks, engagement plans and strategy documentation. If I’m embracing it, the debate is over. The only question now is how to use it well.

Real-World Disruption In Action

Examples already show what this looks like. At my agency, we built an internal AI we call DirectorGPT. It captures our team’s knowledge so anyone can get quick answers without waiting for a senior lead. It saves time, facilitates onboarding and provides a reliable knowledge base. At the same time, agencies are experimenting with platforms that help analyse performance and optimize campaigns faster than ever before.

The lesson isn’t that agencies have no future. In fact, it’s a call to recognize where humans add the most value. Agencies must determine where AI is most effective and where human creativity remains essential. AI can generate a first draft of an email or a landing page. It can even create long-form narrative content and develop a brand strategy. But it can’t replace human creativity.

Inspired marketing pulls from culture, art, literature and even the bizarre. Think about campaigns that feel strange, yet stick because they capture attention in ways no tool could predict: A fast food brand sparring with competitors on social media. A beverage upstart disrupting the bottled water market with unconventional tactics.

True creativity takes something from one corner of culture and combines it with something unrelated to reveal something new. AI can’t make those leaps because it works only with what already exists. Humans can. When creatives use AI for mundane work, we gain time to focus on originality.

AI is the ultimate yes-man. It will flatter you into failure. It’s never going to push back and stop you from publishing something you’ll regret. The person behind the keyboard must be able to distinguish between good and bad. If those skills erode, teams will generate endless stale content that inspires no one to click, read or buy.

The Playbook For Using AI Right

Winning marketers will be the ones who use AI purposefully. These are the moves worth making:

• Leverage AI for speed. Summarize data, prepare talking points and cut down on research time.

• Build stronger engagement plans. Use AI to connect client objectives with practical marketing moves.

• Prompt with purpose. Iterate to refine results, and keep a library of the best prompts.

• Gut-check outputs. Never accept AI at face value. Apply human taste, style and critical thinking.

• Shift your lens to outcomes. Don’t view AI solely as a cost savings tool. Use it to drive outcomes and stay ahead.

Punk Rock Lessons For The Future

For me, adopting AI feels like punk rock. Punk was about breaking the rules, but the best musicians knew the rules first. It’s the same with AI—you must understand how the work is done before you can rebuild it with these tools.

The fear surrounding AI is loud, but like every disruptive technology, the noise will fade as adoption becomes commonplace. Conversations that feel urgent today will sound outdated soon. The same thing happened with the fax machine, the printer and the internet. Each one faced scepticism before becoming standard. AI is following the same path, albeit at a faster pace.

When the Spanish brought horses to North America, the indigenous Plains people had never encountered them before. Within a few generations, they’d incorporated horses into their way of life. They took a foreign technology and used it to leap forward. That’s what humans do. We harness technology and bound forward with it.

The tools are here, and the tide is rising. Marketing isn’t disappearing. It’s about to get more demanding, more creative and more fun. Grab hold, ride the wave and own it.

Feature image credit: getty

By Greg Peters

Find Greg Peters on LinkedIn. Visit Greg’s website.

Sourced from Forbes