AI Won’t Save You From a Sh*t Strategy
There is a delusion currently spreading through B2B marketing teams (and business in general): that AI will swoop in and fix everything.
Stuck for content ideas? Just ask ChatGPT.
Can’t articulate your value proposition? Fire up Claude.
Not sure who your ICP is? Ask Perplexity to “summarise the target market for SaaS CRM platforms in under 200 words.”
There’s a lot of chat in the mainstream press about how AI and LLM models are making us all stupid because we are giving up critical thinking, and I wonder if we are in danger of doing something similar in marketing. Because from where I am sitting, it seems that we’re building prompt libraries faster than we’re building out positioning strategies.
And that could be a problem.
AI is brilliant, make no mistake. I use it daily. It’s an amazing co-pilot, but that’s all it is - a co-pilot. It can help you take off and land the plane, but if you set out in the wrong direction, AI won’t be able to help you avoid the mountain.
AI doesn’t fix broken thinking. It gives you ideas, it gives you options, it gives you content. But it can’t give you strategy.
As a consequence, we’ve got marketing teams automating content production at scale without answering the most basic questions:
Who is this content for?
What story are we trying to tell?
Why should anyone care about this content?
What do we want the reader / viewer / listener to do after they are done?
Instead, we’re seeing marketing leaders approving content calendars that are wall-to-wall-and-treetop-tall full of AI-generated shizzle that nobody asked for and nobody reads.
We are drowning in thought leadership containing no thoughts, and marketing campaigns bereft of a core idea.
And then we wonder why nothing resonates.
AI is like a power drill. An amazing tool that can save time and increase output (unless I am using it, then it becomes a liability. But that’s another story). But if you don’t know where to drill, or why, you’re just putting random holes into random walls. You don’t need a faster drill, you need a plan - a strategy - to make sure you put the holes in the right place.
This isn’t a new problem, by the way. B2B marketing has always had a soft spot for tactics without strategy. We’ve been chasing shiny tools like magpies for years: attribution models, ABM platforms, lead scoring engines and so on. All in the hope they’ll deliver the silver bullet for prospect engagement and pipeline build.
It normally ends up in disappointment.
I’m not saying AI is going to be a disappointment. It’s going to be (already is) revolutionary. But strategy isn’t optional. To get the best out of AI, you still need clear positioning, a defined audience, a compelling message, and differentiation that actually differentiates. AI can’t give you that. It can work from it, scale it, remix it - but only after you’ve done the work.
Because the future of marketing isn’t just about who can create the most content. It’s about who can create meaningful content. And that still requires human brains, not just machine speed.
Let AI help you write. Let it speed up your workflow, and handle the grunt work. But don’t expect it to think for you. That’s your job.
Because no matter how good the tools get, they’ll never save you from a sh*t strategy.