I Love AI. I Miss People.

At first, it feels like a small miracle.

Marketing, a profession built on late nights, blank pages, and the quiet anxiety of the blinking cursor, suddenly gets help. Real help. Artificial intelligence shows up like a junior strategist who never sleeps, never complains, and always has something to say.

Need an email? A headline? A campaign outline?

Done.

And then, slowly, something shifts.

The emails start to sound familiar. The posts fall into the same rhythm. The same phrases appear again and again, drifting from inbox to inbox.

I read a message and I know. No one wrote this.

Not because it’s bad. But because it’s… fine. Polished. Soullessly competent.

That’s the moment that gets me.

The problem isn’t AI. It’s what we’re asking it to do.

AI didn’t flatten marketing on its own. We did that by asking it to replace thinking instead of accelerating it.

Used well, AI is a lever. Used poorly, it becomes a mechanism for sameness.

Marketing has always been about difference. Voice. Perspective. Understanding how people actually feel.

When everyone uses the same tools the same way, difference quietly disappears.

What’s left is efficiency without identity. Speed without substance.

You don’t remember it. You don’t feel it. You keep scrolling.

Here’s the irony I can’t shake.

The easier it becomes to produce content, the harder it becomes to stand out.

I didn’t enter this profession to generate volume. I entered it to make work people recognize themselves in.

That recognition often lives in the imperfect parts. In awkward phrasing. In lived experience. In small choices shaped by who someone is, where they’ve been, and what they care about.

AI doesn’t have that.

The future of marketing won’t belong to the people who generate the most content. It will belong to the ones who edit with intention. Who know when to stop the machine. Who rewrite the sentence that feels a little too smooth. Who put the friction back in, because friction is where personality lives.

AI should make our work lighter. Not emptier.

When an AI-written email disappoints me, it’s not because I hate technology. It’s because I miss the signal that another human was here.

We can feel it. We always have.

Marketing only works when someone on the other side feels addressed, not processed.

The future won’t belong to those who automate everything or chase the perfect prompt. It will belong to those who know what not to automate.

The ones who use AI to think better, not less. To move faster, not flatter. To amplify what makes them human.

Because in the end, the brands we remember won’t be the most efficient ones.

They’ll be the ones that still sound like someone cared enough to write them.

And no machine, yet, knows how to care