No, AI Won’t Replace Marketers
Once a decade a revolutionary product or service changes everything. The last time this happened was in 2007 with the iPhone. In fact, we’ve been overdue for a ‘revolution’ for a while.
Yet not all revolutions are the same. While the iPhone clearly changed society and the we communicate, it was arguably not as significant a revolution as the advent of the personal computer in the 1980s. Furthermore, all of the technological revolutions of the past 50 years pale in comparison with the changes society endured between 1890 and 1945.
Think about it. In those 50 years, electricity, the automobile, the airplane, and the atomic bomb all came into existence. We went from the horse-drawn carriage to the jet engine.
The newest revolution is Personal AI. While we can get into the weeds about whether ‘AI’ Chatbots like ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing AI are actually artificial intelligence (spoilers: they’re not), the fact is that the profound changes that these chatbots are having on society will be akin to electrification in the early 20th century. We will not recognize the society that will be born out of the post-AI revolution.
While we don’t know what the future will hold in this scenario, there is one thing I’m absolutely certain of.
The profession of marketing will not disappear.
Marketing Has Been With Us Forever. AI Won’t Change That.
For as long as there has been trade, there has been marketing. One can imagine ancient merchants in Greece, Rome, China, India, and Persia trying to outcompete each other by having elaborate stands, thinking about which products they want their prospective customers to see first when they walk by, paying off influential nobles to use their products or introduce it into their courts, and erecting signs ensuring travelers know they can find their products and services nearby.
The fact is that human beings have never changed. Any human behavior that exists now has existed in some form or another for thousands of years and will continue to exist in a world dominated by AI. As long as trade and commerce persist, so too will the marketer.
Why AI Can’t Replace Marketers
There’s a lot of doom and gloom about AI stealing jobs and, to a certain extent, it already has. While low-level copywriting and translation jobs may be lost as AI takes a more prominent role in content creation, the fact is that a marketing and advertising position is relatively secure. Why? Because AI sucks can’t replace human strategic thinking, judgment, empathy, and creativity.
Do you know what makes for a great piece of marketing? Great marketing or advertising comes from an alignment of heart and mind. This universal truth has been known since at least the time of the Ancient Greeks (See: Aristotle’s Rhetoric where he details Ethos, appeal to authority, Pathos, appeal to emotion, and Logos, appeal to logic – the combination of the three have been known since the Ancient times to be quite persuasive indeed)
Since AI will never be able to peer into the souls of man and gleam insights, it will never replace the marketer. As marketers our role is to use our understanding of human psychology in order to motivate our fellow human beings to purchase – and purchase now.
The AI Is Our Marketing Tool
It’s worth noting that AI has two simultaneous effects: it unscales industries, favoring the development of networks which then can be exploited by new entrepreneurial activity (See the book: Unscaled for more on this) while simultaneously helping individuals free up more bandwidth by taking on their workload and exponentially increasing their output and productivity. You could say AI unscales industries and scales up individuals.
This is what Marketing Ronin is all about. It’s the reason I started this blog and it’s one of the key components of my methodology. The Marketing Ronin is a one-person agency and in order to function in this capacity must embrace AI as part of your marketing workflow.
Instead of fighting against change, Marketing Ronin embraces it and uses it to their advantage. Tasks that would take an inordinate amount of time like generating copy, images, or videos can now be dramatically quickened by using AI. While you must hone your mind, judgment, and ruthlessness in terms of what the AI outputs, you no longer need to trouble yourself with spending hours to generate your ad creative. This frees you up for what human beings do best: critical thought.
Mastering The Path of The Marketing Ronin
How do you become a master marketer? How do you thrive in the age of AI? How can you come to embody the spirit of the Japanese ronin, the knight with no master?
My methodology was built around allowing you to achieve your full potential as a marketer while retaining your freedom and independence from agencies or employers.
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