AI or Human? Some Thoughts on Navigating AI Automation in Marketing

Here at Falls & Co. we’re watching and experimenting with AI with equal parts fascination and trepidation. The promise of AI is appealing: hyper-efficiency, instant personalization, and the ability to generate content at a scale that would make a team of content producers blush. But with great power comes great responsibility – and, frankly, the risk of falling flat on your face if you don’t wield it carefully.

The Lure of Efficiency

Let’s start with the obvious. AI can churn out content faster and cheaper than a human ever could. It can write emails, craft ad copy, generate product descriptions, and draft social media posts. With an ever-growing number of platforms, marketers have access to powerful tools that promise to revolutionize their workflows. But here’s the rub. Efficiency without empathy is a surefire way to alienate your audience.

Spam, that age-old villain of digital marketing, is about to enter a golden age. AI makes it easy to create hyper-automated, algorithmically optimized messages that flood inboxes and social feeds. But if these messages lack nuance, creativity, and the authenticity of human touch, they’re just noise – a digital cacophony that consumers are increasingly tuning out.

Impersonal AI Can Backfire

Not all people hate AI. What they hate is being treated like they’re being preyed on by a transactional machine. AI is often deployed under the banner of personalization, but there’s a difference between being called by your first name in an email and receiving a message that feels like it was crafted for you by someone who understands your needs.

What Happens When You Rely Too Heavily on AI?

It’s easy to lose your brand voice, or, more broadly, the human voice when over-relying on AI. AI can struggle to capture the subtleties of a brand’s tone and personality. It can mimic, but it rarely invents or innovates. Because that’s not what Large Language Models do. They produce the next likely word. And let’s face it, the greatest products and services, and at least so far, the greatest marketing campaigns, are usually the opposite of what was expected most next. Here are a few pitfalls to watch out for when using AI in your marketing and communications efforts:

• Alienating Consumers: People are pretty savvy at telling when a message is generic, no matter how much it’s dressed up with data-driven personalization.
• Lack of Trust: Trust is built on authenticity. If consumers sense your communication lacks sincerity, they’ll disengage.
• Inundation: AI automation can lead to communicating too much, too often. Bombarding your audience with a barrage of messages across a bunch of touchpoints is a quick way to turn them off.

The Right Way to Use AI

Will AI evolve to become the villain some people are warning against? It’s hard to say. But if AI becomes a crutch for lazy marketers, then yes, throw a black hat on your AI assistant now. The key to using AI is to do it thoughtfully. AI can be a powerful ally in crafting campaigns that resonate. Here’s how marketers can strike the right balance:

Use AI for Data, Not Decisions

AI is terrific at gathering and analyzing data and uncovering insights about your audience – what they care about, where they spend their time, and how they interact with your brand. But when it comes to making creative decisions and building strategic plans and roadmaps, the human touch is if not essential, then pretty darn valuable. A bright, thoughtful, intentional human working with data-driven insights is where the magic happens.

Augment, Don’t Automate

Thinking about AI as a replacement for a person is shortsighted. AI’s greatest potential is unleashed when you use it as a highly skilled collaborator. You can use AI to draft initial ideas, generate variations, or handle repetitive tasks like A/B testing. But AI isn’t perfect. It doesn’t always get things right. And sometimes it makes things up and produces ideas or content that’s off brand or target. To ensure you’re using AI to its full advantage, we recommend that a person reviews, refines, and humanizes every piece of AI-enabled content you produce.

Don’t Forget: People Respond Best to Great Storytelling

Think about it. Are you more apt to connect to a bunch of data, or with a highly compelling story that touches on something you’re interested in or care about? While AI can help you identify trends and tailor messaging, the narrative needs to come from a human. This is where the human touch shines – in crafting stories that evoke emotion and build connections.

Be Transparent

If you’re using AI, let people know. Be upfront about it. Transparency builds trust. For example, a simple “This message was created with the help of AI and curated by our team” goes a long way in reassuring consumers that there’s a human behind the curtain.

Favor Quality Over Quantity

Just because you have the ability to create tons of content every day doesn’t mean you should. Focus on producing fewer, higher-quality messages that truly resonate with your audience. AI should enhance your ability to be thoughtful, not enable thoughtlessness.

Embracing a Human-Centric AI Strategy

Let’s face it, AI is here to stay. The race is on to do more with AI, to push it further. If you didn’t already know that it was certainly hammered home recently when the U.S. Stock Market was sent tumbling by the news that a Chinese firm announced the existence of DeepSeek, a supposedly much cheaper to make competitor to ChatGPT and other American AI offerings.

AI’s role in marketing is only going to grow as the technology becomes more sophisticated. But as marketers, we must resist the temptation to use it as a shortcut to connection. The brands that win in the age of AI will be the ones that use it to amplify their humanity, not replace it.

So, here’s my advice to marketers: Use AI to do what it does best: analyze, optimize, brainstorm, and automate. But never forget that your audience is human. And at the end of the day, humans crave connection, authenticity, and stories that make them feel something.

The future of marketing isn’t AI versus humans. It’s AI and humans, working together to create something extraordinary. Let’s not settle for less.

To learn more about digital marketing and trends in AI, contact us.