Is AI Making Us Lazy Marketers? A Wake-Up Call for Business Leaders

Okay, so you’ve invested in AI tools for your marketing team. On paper, everything’s starting to look really good. You’re starting to see, well, content appears to be being produced faster, which is great. Campaigns, they seem to be getting launched more frequently, which is awesome, and the team seems to be more productive than ever. But at the same time, you’re noticing something a little bit concerning: that the creative spark that used to drive your marketing is dimming. Maybe presentations are starting to feel really templated. Your social media posts are looking just like your competitors’, and looking very generic, and it’s starting to lose its brand voice.

And despite all this content that you’re pushing out, engagement just isn’t improving. And if this is you, you’re not alone. Because as AI tools become more and more sophisticated, business owners and marketing leaders across the country and across the world are starting to grapple with a new hidden cost that very few seem to be talking about right now. And that’s what we want to discuss on the podcast today. And that is the gradual erosion of critical thinking and creativity.

And I want to take it from the perspective of a marketing team. And we’re going to base this talk based on some recent research from Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University, which uncovered this trend. It was just brought out a week ago. And look, what I want to get across here is while AI is revolutionising how we are working, how customers are discovering us, there’s also a side to it that is fundamentally changing how we are thinking, how we are creating. And it doesn’t always seem for the better as well.

If we haven’t met, my name is Jordan McFadyen. Welcome to the Marketing Mindset podcast. This podcast is designed to help give you some clarity in this cluttered, AI-driven world that we face in business and in marketing, and help you to build a strategic marketing strategy that can move with industry evolutions.

And like I say, today I think this is a really interesting topic. I’m seeing more and more people talking about it now. And as I’m taking a real stance, I’m trying to think about, in business and in marketing, how can business leaders, how can marketing leaders start to adopt AI, but do it in a real purposeful way? And I think understanding some of the research that we’re going to chat about here, and looking at some ways that we can try and prevent them within our own marketing teams as leaders, is going to be really important.

And today we’re going to explore not just the problems, but I want to try to share some ideas, some actionable solutions, to actually help us all come together and figure this out about how to build a marketing team that can leverage AI, and that understands AI and how AI is changing the way that customers deal and find and work with businesses, but maintaining our creative edge, our brand voice, our brand essence that we’ve built for years and years that is slowly starting to get ripped away.

So the first thing, let’s just have a look at this piece of research, because I think it’s really interesting. The research revealed this new statistic. It was 59.29% of those that were part of the survey that are working in fields like marketing, research, that type of thing. They self-reported for this research. And they self-reported having engaged in some sort of critical thinking while they were also using generative AI tools. 59.29%. And that’s actually, to be fair, it sounds pretty encouraging.

But also, on the other aspect, it’s also quite astounding, because that means that 40% of those that were surveyed were not applying any type of critical thinking as part of their interaction with generative AI, with Claude, with GPT. That means they’re simply going in blind. They’re not challenging any of the responses, not thinking critically about the prompts and how to use the AI tools that were required to assist with their task and get the task done in a better way. And also creating what I’ve said for a long time, AI slop with their content, creating crap with their blogs that no one’s going to read.

And honestly, as a business leader, and leaders in any field, and in marketing especially, this is something that should be prompting a few alarm bells. And get us really trying to think about how our teams, how our businesses, how our employees, how are they going to use AI tools? And how are we as business leaders going to foster the use of thoughtful engagement with AI tools, as opposed to our employees and our teams and our marketing strategies essentially just becoming a replacement? And AI is like that replacement to build all of that.

So here’s another thing. The study highlighted another interesting statistic. And that was 72% of knowledge workers, again, the same people, so knowledge workers being, I don’t know, marketers, researchers, that type of thing. They also experienced reduced effort in tasks like knowledge retrieval or knowledge summarising when they were using generative AI tools. So essentially, they were getting a little bit too comfortable.

So while the efficiency of using generative AI tools to look over large pieces of documents and analyse documents and summarise documents, while that’s really valuable, it’s also presenting a challenge for us as business leaders about how do we maintain the benefits of that fantastic piece of technology and what it can do, but also ensure our teams continue to develop critical thinking skills on top of that. So taking those summaries, taking the reports that generative AI is able to do, if they’re able to summarise a complete 90-page PDF document into a page, how do we then add another layer of critical thinking skills on top of that, so that we don’t become lazy marketers?

So as teams are becoming more and more confident with AI, they’re seeing, oh my gosh, there’s so many cool ways that you can use it. They’re also feeling less and less inclined to actually make edits to that work as well. And this is something that we need to think about internally in our businesses, around how should we be establishing processes that maintain quality control, even as our employees’ confidence in AI continues to grow.

So the research was pretty clear, and especially in terms of marketing, that it showed that successful AI implementation really does require this balanced approach. And this is where I want you to get thinking about how this works within your business, about how can you get your team to use AI to generate those initial campaign structures or ideas or visuals, or create briefs for you? How can we get and kind of entrust our team to use AI to be able to become our editor, to become the ideation stage, to help summarise our core notes from our meetings into campaign ideas? And how can we foster an engagement of having team members review, refine all of the suggestions that AI is putting in place?

How do we as a team, and as a business leader, think about creating specific prompts for use within your business, even if it’s to help with the content process for marketing teams? A specific prompt that isn’t generic, isn’t going to be used by every business, but it’s used with a layer that allows and shows and gives AI tools information about your target audience, your niche, your product, your values, your unique selling points, your brand voice that you’ve created over years, giving specific examples, and putting that layer on top of specific prompts when creating ideation stages for content and for the editorial stages of content. And then making sure that our teams are iterating on AI suggestions, and making sure that everything then is aligning with our brand values as well.

And here’s some ideas anyway that I’ve been jotting down. After reading this report, I’m thinking this is massive. And this is a thing that I’ve been talking about for a long time, is about how do we become purposeful AI users in the marketplace and the marketing teams? And I think that we need to start building out frameworks. And this is something that we’re doing internally now at our business, are building out frameworks for critical oversight, oversight of everything that is happening in the business, especially things that are powered by AI.

So trying to balance routine tasks versus strategic thinking. Because again, that study found 72% of those workers studied perceived reduced effort in thinking and analysis tasks when using AI. So this means that for marketing teams, and for teams across the entire business, we should be allowing and imploring our team to let AI handle things like our repetitive tasks, like that ideation stage, like generating meeting notes from our meetings, like the editorial stage of content, like having and pulling together the key parts of analytics reports and looking through data to find patterns. That repetitive tasks that marketing teams are doing often, we should be allowing and using these tools to make that faster, but reserving human effort for the higher-level strategic decisions.

Of course, we can use AI to help structure how we tackle those problems, giving us ideas about what we should tackle first and what order, but any of that higher-level strategic decision, that’s the thinking that the team needs to do. And we need to focus our team energy on that high-level stuff, and maintaining rigorous content validation, and also building verification and processes into the business, making sure that every piece of content that’s being distributed and sent out is getting that level, that second check, that level of human interaction on top of what could be an AI piece of content.

So again, this really opens up this conversation about how do we create this culture of reflection within a business? Because the research emphasised that the people in the report who engaged in the reflective thinking then produced higher quality outputs. So what we need to be thinking about here is how do we organise regular sessions within our teams to review that AI-generated content, as I said before? How do we encourage teams to question whether the content is aligning with campaign goals, instead of just taking any old piece of content that’s being chucked out from AI and kind of taking that as done and dusted and well researched? How do we create frameworks for evaluating AI-generated ideas on top of that as well?

Next big thing I want to think about is we need to be fostering a culture within our businesses around long-term skill development, team growth, how to use AI as a learning tool, because that study again has revealed that skill development was a key motivator for the critical thinking. So what we need to be thinking about is how can we use these analyses that AI create to help us to improve our creative skills, understanding why certain edits may work better than others, and how do we work together in creating better prompts and skills within our prompting, and building different layers to be able to give AI the relevant information to actually make and help us make better critical decisions.

So again, instead of just chucking in a random generic prompt, taking that and running with it, how do we add that critical layer of thinking on top, maintain that focus of continuous learning and development, and integrating AI into our workflows without eliminating any sort of human creativity? Any AI workflow should have a level of human creativity that sits on top.

The checklist, I guess I could say, of what I’ve written down from my notes, from what I’ve learned from this, and I’m keen to understand what you’re thinking as well, to actually ensure that your marketing team is maintaining its creative edge, but also leveraging the power of AI. Because I don’t think we need to turn a blind eye to AI at all. We need to be thinking about how we can use it more, but in a purposeful way.

So the checklist would be: establish clear guidelines for AI tool usage within your organisation. Think about creating review processes for AI-generated content. So if it’s generated, and if it’s been used at any point of that, like I say, I would never recommend that you create AI-generated slop, but how do you create that review process for AI-generated content? The third thing is, how can you schedule regular team discussions about your AI usage, your AI implementation, things they’re learning, how they’re using it, to make sure that there is that level of human creativity at all times?

Think about step number four, investing in training that’s combining AI efficiency and critical thinking. How do you employ that and build that together into your business? And the fifth checklist I’ll be getting you to think about is, how do you monitor the balance between AI as an assistance tool and human creativity, and really writing a robust guideline on how that looks in your organisation?

Because look, this research paper has clearly shown, and it’s really got me thinking, that while AI is obviously significantly reducing a lot of brain power and brain effort, that’s 72% reporting reduced effort in routine tasks based on AI. The key here lies in maintaining human oversight, critical thinking, creative input. And as leaders in business, and leaders in marketing, and leaders in AI, purposeful AI marketing, our role is really to ensure that AI is enhancing rather than replacing our team’s critical thinking abilities. Otherwise, we’re just going to get lazier and lazier. Because this balance isn’t just about maintaining quality. It’s about building stronger, more capable marketing teams that can leverage AI, but continue to grow and develop their critical thinking skills.

But look, the research clearly shows that while AI can significantly reduce the effort that we have to spend on actually thinking about different things, remember that stat, 72% reporting reduced effort in routine tasks. So the research is clearly showing that, but the key to success is going to lie in maintaining human oversight and critical thinking as a layer on top of the AI processes that are coming into your business right now.

And as business leaders, marketing leaders, as leaders in purposeful use of AI in business, our role, and my mission, is to ensure that AI is going to continue to enhance rather than replace our team’s and your team’s critical thinking abilities. Because it’s so imperative. Because this balance isn’t just about maintaining quality with your marketing or anything like that. It’s about how do we build stronger, more capable marketing teams and employees that can leverage AI while continuing to grow and develop their skills at the same time.

Because remember, the goal isn’t here to resist AI advancement. It is here. It’s not a trend. It’s changing not only how employees work, but also how customers find us. But instead of resisting this AI advancement, it’s more about how do we harness it in a way that’s going to strengthen our capabilities in-house, while maintaining that human insight, that brand that you’ve built, that is truly going to drive exceptional marketing results.

And I hope this has got you thinking today. And I hope this has got you thinking around how you can incorporate and build a purposeful AI usage report in your organisation, about how your team can be using AI. And look, if you think that someone else in your network would find this helpful, I would love it if you could share it with them. Because like I say, it’s my mission as well to try and make sure that businesses are using AI in a purposeful way. So the more people that can hear these messages, these reports, the more we can grow together as a business community and understand how AI can truly help our businesses, but also some of the pitfalls we need to be looking out for as well.

And look, again, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today on the Marketing Mindset podcast. And we look forward to seeing you on the next episode.