The Uncomfortable Truth About AI in Marketing
There’s a narrative floating around that AI will make marketing easier. More accessible. That anyone can now do what used to require specialists.
I don’t believe that.
After spending the past year integrating AI into how my team works – across content, campaign operations, analytics, and strategy – I’ve arrived at a different conclusion:
AI doesn’t make marketing easier. It makes marketing more technical.
And that changes who wins.
The Real Skill Isn’t Prompting
When people talk about “learning AI,” they usually mean learning to prompt. Write better instructions. Get better outputs.
That’s the trivial part.
The hard part is everything around it:
How do you structure inputs so they’re consistent and scalable?
How do you chain outputs from one tool into another?
How do you integrate AI into your existing systems – your CRM, your CMS, your analytics stack?
How do you build workflows that your team can actually repeat?
How do you evaluate whether any of this is working?
These aren’t creative questions. They’re engineering questions.
The Mindset Shift
Most CMOs – myself included, initially – were trained in brand, storytelling, demand gen. We learned to think in campaigns, channels, and audiences.
That’s still valuable. But it’s no longer sufficient.
The CMOs who will thrive in this next phase are the ones who can also think in systems. Who can architect workflows. Who understand how data flows, where processes break, and how to build things that scale.
You don’t need to have been an engineer. But you need to start thinking like one.
That’s the gap I see in most marketing orgs right now. Not a tools gap. Not a budget gap. A mindset gap.
Why I’m Writing This
I run marketing at a 300M+ ARR software company. I don’t have this figured out. But I’m further along than most, and I’m learning fast – through real experiments, real failures, and a lot of iteration.
I decided to build in public because I couldn’t find what I needed: an honest, practitioner-level account of what it actually takes to make AI a core capability in a serious marketing org.
Not thought leadership. Not vendor hype. Not “10 prompts to save time.”
Real decisions. Real tradeoffs. Real results.
What You’ll Get
Every week, I’ll share:
One experiment – what I tested, what happened, what I’d do differently
One question I’m wrestling with – the strategic stuff that doesn’t have easy answers
One tool or workflow – what I’m evaluating or building right now
For paid subscribers, I’ll also share the actual templates, frameworks, and how-to’s – the stuff that lets you skip the trial-and-error.
The Bet I’m Making
I believe the next generation of great CMOs will be systems thinkers. They’ll be as comfortable discussing MCP integrations as they are discussing brand positioning.
That’s a high bar. It’s also learnable.
If you’re a marketing leader trying to figure out how to actually operationalize AI – not just experiment with it – this newsletter is for you.
Let’s figure it out together.
See you next week.