Earlier this week, I read an interesting article by Ethan Mollick about the practical wisdom of AI use. While his insights apply broadly, I want to focus on how these principles specifically help marketers in particular.

Let’s explore when AI can supercharge your marketing efforts and when you might want to keep it traditional.

When to Embrace AI in Marketing

1. Generating Creative Campaign Ideas

Mollick points out that quantity often leads to quality in ideation – and this is particularly true in marketing. AI can help you brainstorm dozens of campaign taglines, social media hooks, or email subject lines. You might get 50 ideas where you would have stopped at 5, and that 47th idea might be the gem you’re looking for.

Consider a product launch campaign where you need multiple angles to test. AI can generate variations that approach the product benefits from different perspectives – emotional benefits, practical advantages, aspirational messaging, and problem-solving frameworks. This diversity of approaches helps you discover unexpected angles that might resonate with different audience segments in ways you hadn’t considered.

2. Adapting Content for Different Platforms

One of Mollick’s key points is AI’s strength in “translation between frames.” In marketing terms, this means taking your core message and adapting it for different channels. Have a white paper? AI can help transform it into social media posts, email newsletters, blog posts, and video scripts – each maintaining your message while speaking the native language of each platform.

Take a technical product announcement: AI can help translate complex feature improvements into bite-sized LinkedIn updates, engaging Instagram stories, and clear customer email communications. Each version maintains the core message but adapts the language, format, and focus for its specific platform.

For example, the same product feature might become a quick tip on Twitter, an in-depth tutorial on YouTube, and a series of step-by-step Instagram stories.

3. Market Research Analysis

When you need to digest large amounts of survey data or customer feedback, AI can be invaluable. While you’ll want to verify critical insights, AI can quickly identify patterns and themes in customer responses that might take days to process manually.

Beyond basic sentiment analysis, AI can identify unexpected correlations in customer behavior, spot emerging trends in feedback data, and categorize responses in ways that might not be immediately obvious to human analysts.

For instance, it might notice that customers who mention price concerns also frequently discuss specific features, revealing opportunities for value-based messaging or bundling strategies.

4. A/B Testing Variations

AI excels at creating multiple versions of content while maintaining core messaging. Need 20 different versions of an ad headline to test? AI can generate variations while keeping your key value proposition intact, each testing different emotional triggers, benefit structures, or calls to action.

These variations can go beyond simple word changes to test different psychological approaches.

For instance, AI might generate versions that focus on scarcity (“Limited time offer”), social proof (“Join 10,000 satisfied customers”), authority (“Recommended by experts”), or problem-solving (“Never worry about X again”). Each variation maintains brand voice while exploring different persuasion principles.

5. Competitive Analysis

AI can help analyze competitor content, websites, and social media presence to identify patterns and opportunities. As Mollick notes, this works best when you’re the expert who can evaluate the AI’s insights about market positioning, messaging evolution, and content strategies.

For example, AI can track how competitors’ messaging has evolved over time, identifying shifts in target audience, value propositions, or market positioning. It might notice that a competitor is increasingly focusing on sustainability messaging or shifting their tone to appeal to a younger demographic, helping you spot market trends and potential opportunities or threats.

6. Content Calendar Planning

AI can analyze historical engagement data to suggest optimal posting times, content themes, and topic clusters. By examining past performance patterns, it can identify which types of content resonate best with your audience during different seasons or events.

This planning goes beyond simple scheduling. AI can help identify content gaps, suggest timely topics based on industry trends, and create content sequences that build upon each other.

For example, it might notice that educational content performs better early in the week while entertaining content gets more engagement on Fridays, helping you optimize your content mix.

7. First Draft Creation

When facing a blank page, AI can help generate initial drafts that include key points, relevant data, and basic structure. These drafts serve as a starting point for human refinement, helping overcome writer’s block and ensuring key messages are included.

The key is using these drafts as a foundation rather than a final product. AI can suggest different angles, include relevant statistics, and create a basic flow, but human expertise is needed to add authentic insights, brand voice, and emotional resonance.

8. Performance Report Generation

For those routine marketing reports that follow a standard format, AI can compile data, generate initial insights, and create first drafts. This includes monthly performance summaries, campaign results, or social media analytics reports.

Beyond just compiling numbers, AI can identify notable trends, flag significant changes, and suggest areas for investigation.

For instance, it might notice that engagement rates dropped during certain hours or that specific content themes consistently outperform others, providing starting points for deeper human analysis.

9. Customer Persona Validation

While humans should lead persona development, AI can analyze customer data to validate assumptions and identify gaps in your persona definitions. It can process large amounts of customer interaction data to spot patterns that might challenge or confirm your existing personas.

For example, AI might notice that customers you’ve categorized together actually show different behavior patterns in their content consumption or purchase journey. These insights can help refine your personas and identify new segments you hadn’t considered.

10. Content Optimization

AI can analyze existing content performance and suggest improvements for SEO, readability, and engagement. This includes identifying keyword opportunities, suggesting structural improvements, and highlighting areas where clarity could be improved.

Beyond technical optimization, AI can help identify content gaps, suggest internal linking opportunities, and recommend updates to keep content fresh and relevant.

It might notice that certain topics consistently drive conversions or that specific content structures tend to perform better with your audience.

11. Marketing Compliance Checks

Use AI to conduct initial reviews of marketing materials for regulatory compliance, brand guidelines adherence, and consistency across campaigns. This first-pass review can catch common issues before human experts conduct their final review.

This includes checking for required disclaimers, ensuring consistent brand terminology, and flagging potentially problematic claims or language. AI can also help maintain consistency in tone and messaging across different marketing materials, ensuring brand coherence.

12. Audience Segmentation Analysis

AI can identify nuanced patterns in customer behavior data to suggest new segmentation approaches and targeting opportunities. It might discover unexpected correlations between purchasing patterns, content preferences, and customer characteristics. These insights can lead to more sophisticated targeting strategies.

For instance, AI might identify micro-segments within your broader audience categories or discover behavior patterns that indicate a customer is ready for specific types of marketing messages.

13. Trend Forecasting

By analyzing historical data and current patterns, AI can help predict emerging trends and suggest potential pivots in your marketing strategy. This includes identifying seasonal patterns, emerging topics, and shifts in customer behavior.

The real value comes from combining multiple data sources – social media trends, search data, customer feedback, and industry news – to spot emerging opportunities before they become obvious. AI can process these diverse inputs faster than humans, giving you a head start on trend adaptation.

14. Social Media Response Templates

AI can help create templates for common social media interactions, ensuring consistent brand voice while saving time on routine responses. These templates can cover frequently asked questions, common customer service issues, and standard engagement responses.

The key is creating templates that feel authentic and can be easily customized for specific situations. AI can help generate variations that maintain brand voice while allowing for personalization based on the specific context or customer.

15. Cross-Channel Performance Analysis

AI can analyze performance across multiple marketing channels to identify synergies and optimization opportunities. This includes understanding how different channels work together and identifying the most effective channel combinations for different audience segments.

This analysis can reveal insights about customer journey patterns, attribution models, and cross-channel effects.

For instance, AI might notice that email campaigns perform better when supported by specific social media content, or that certain audience segments respond better to particular channel combinations.

16. Cross-Domain Marketing Projects

Marketing often requires knowledge of multiple fields – from psychology to data analytics to design. AI can help bridge knowledge gaps when your campaign touches areas outside your expertise, providing quick insights or basic translations across domains.

For example, when launching a technical product, AI can help translate complex specifications into compelling marketing messages without requiring deep technical expertise. Or when creating financial marketing materials, AI can help ensure accuracy while maintaining accessibility for a general audience.

17. Quick Tactical Execution

Some marketing tasks need speed over perfection – like responding to a trending topic or creating multiple variations of ad copy for rapid testing. When speed matters more than polish, AI can help you move quickly while maintaining acceptable quality.

This is particularly valuable in real-time marketing situations where being part of the conversation early is more important than perfect execution. AI can help generate quick responses to trending topics, create rapid ad variations for testing, or produce initial drafts of timely content.

18. Specialized Writing Styles

AI can help when you need to write in specific technical, industry, or cultural vocabularies that you might not fully command. This is particularly useful when targeting niche markets or professional audiences with their own specialized language.

Beyond just using the right terminology, AI can help adapt your messaging to match the communication style and preferences of specific professional or cultural groups. This includes understanding industry-specific concerns, professional standards, and communication norms.

19. Technical Marketing Tasks

Some marketing tasks are technical, tedious to learn, but easy to verify, like basic HTML email template modifications or simple graphics adjustments. AI can handle these tasks when learning the technical skills yourself isn’t worth the investment.

The key is focusing on tasks where the output can be easily verified for accuracy. For instance, AI can help with meta tag generation, basic image optimization, or UTM parameter creation – tasks where success criteria are clear and objective.

20. Objective Performance Analysis

For tasks with clear right/wrong answers (like verifying tracking code implementation) AI can provide quick, accurate verification.

This type of analysis works best for tasks with well-defined parameters and objective success criteria. AI can quickly scan large amounts of content for technical compliance, flag potential issues, and verify that marketing materials meet specific requirements.

21. Initial Research and Data Gathering

When you need broad information gathering across multiple sources that will later be verified, AI can accelerate the process while you focus on validation and synthesis. This includes collecting competitor information, industry statistics, or market trends.

The key is using AI as a first-pass research assistant, gathering potential data points and sources that human experts can then verify and analyze. This approach combines AI’s ability to process large amounts of information quickly with human expertise in evaluation and interpretation.

When to Keep AI at Arm’s Length

1. Brand Voice Development

While AI can mimic your brand voice, it shouldn’t create it. The process of developing your brand’s authentic voice requires deep understanding of your company’s values, culture, and audience – things that need human insight and emotional intelligence.

Brand voice comes from a deep understanding of your company’s mission, values, and connection with customers. It needs to reflect authentic human experiences and emotions that AI can’t truly replicate. Plus, relying on AI for brand voice development risks creating a generic, inauthentic voice that fails to differentiate your brand.

2. Crisis Communication

In sensitive situations where accuracy and nuance are crucial, AI should at most be a drafting assistant, not the primary author. Crisis communication requires real-time emotional intelligence and an understanding of complex stakeholder relationships.

The stakes are simply too high in crisis situations to rely on AI-generated responses. Each word choice can have significant implications, and the context of a crisis often requires reading between the lines and understanding subtle cultural or emotional nuances that AI might miss.

3. Core Strategy Development

As Mollick emphasizes, using AI can short-circuit the valuable struggle that leads to deep understanding. Your marketing strategy needs to come from thorough market understanding and creative problem-solving, processes that benefit from human struggle and insight.

Strategy development requires wrestling with ambiguity, making intuitive connections, and drawing on deep market experience. While AI can provide data and insights to inform strategy, the core strategic thinking needs to come from human expertise and understanding.

4. High-Stakes Client Presentations

Client presentations, especially for high-value accounts or crucial pitches, need the human touch. The ability to read the room, adjust on the fly, and build genuine rapport comes from human emotional intelligence and experience.

These presentations often involve nuanced discussions, handling unexpected questions, and building trust through authentic interaction. While AI can help prepare materials, the presentation itself needs human presence and ability to adapt to client reactions and needs.

5. Building Authentic Customer Relationships

While AI can help manage customer interactions, building genuine, long-term relationships with key clients or community members requires human empathy, intuition, and authentic connection.

These relationships are built on shared experiences, genuine understanding, and the ability to truly listen and respond to unstated needs. AI can support relationship management, but the core of strong customer relationships needs to be human-to-human.

6. Emotional Marketing Content

Holiday messages, personal stories, or deeply emotional marketing campaigns need authentic human touch. These messages resonate because they come from genuine human experience and understanding.

When content needs to connect on an emotional level – whether it’s celebrating achievements, acknowledging challenges, or sharing in customers’ important moments – it needs to come from authentic human emotion and experience. AI might help with grammar or structure, but the core emotional resonance must be human.

7. Quick Tasks That Are Faster to Do Yourself

Be wary of the “AI trap” – sometimes crafting the perfect prompt and reviewing AI’s output takes longer than just writing that social media post yourself. Just like delegation, using AI should save time, not create extra work.

This is particularly true for simple, straightforward tasks where you already know exactly what you want to say. In these cases, the time spent explaining the task to AI and reviewing its output might be better spent just doing the task directly.

That being said, spending a bit of time in the beginning perfecting that prompt, can save you a lot of time along the way. For example, I spent quite a bit of time on developing and refining a prompt that helps me translate IT language into language that a regular, non-technical business user can understand. But now, whenever I need to write content, it saves me a tremendous amount of time.

8. Community Management

Real community building requires authentic human interaction. While AI can help moderate and organize community content, the heart of community management lies in building genuine human connections.

Community members can usually tell when they’re interacting with AI versus a real person, and authentic community engagement requires genuine human presence and understanding. AI can support community management tasks, but shouldn’t be the primary voice of your community.

Finding the Right Balance

The key to effective AI use in marketing is understanding where it can amplify your capabilities versus where it might diminish the human elements that make marketing effective. Use AI to handle repetitive tasks, generate initial ideas, and process large amounts of data – but keep the strategic thinking, emotional resonance, and final decision-making in human hands.

Most importantly, remember that AI’s capabilities and limitations are constantly evolving. What AI couldn’t do well last month might be its strength today. Stay curious, keep experimenting, but always maintain a critical eye on the results.

Your goal isn’t to replace human creativity and insight with AI, but to use AI as a tool that frees up your time and energy for the aspects of marketing that truly require human touch: building relationships, understanding emotional nuances, and creating authentic connections with your audience.

Join The Hybrid Advantage today to connect with other marketers who are learning to balance AI tools with human expertise. Together, we can explore how to use AI effectively while maintaining the authentic human connection that great marketing requires.