No, AI won’t change your marketing job: A contrarian perspective

Artificial intelligence (AI) is over-hyped.

• AI is not the panacea to your business’s woes. 
• AI will not fix your unproductive team. 
• AI will not catapult your career overnight. 

AI is an emerging technology that has captured the zeitgeist, and its long-term impact is unknown. 

Three tenets of my argument for why AI will not change your job include:

• The need for emotional intelligence.
• The value of human relationships.
• The view that AI is a tool, not a replacement for humans.

Emotional intelligence over artificial intelligence

AI will not change the people element of your job. Knowing how to work with people and empowering them to bring their best remains unchanged as technology advances. 

The current era of emerging generative AI is exciting, but it will not replace the need for humans to interact with humans. 

If it ever does, then we as a species have a much bigger problem.  

Instead of taking a course on AI or scrolling through your social media feed to uncover the latest AI hacks, take a course on public speaking or read about how emotions impact decision-making. 

Focusing your time on your “soft skills,” becoming more of a “people person”, and improving your overall emotional intelligence (EQ) will make you a much more well-rounded professional than knowing the ins and outs of AI. 

Humans are emotional beings that use reason to help rationalize our largely emotionally driven decisions. 

Being self-aware of how your emotions impact your decisions and how the emotions of others impact decisions, then using that information to improve your interactions with people are critical life skills. 

The value of EQ cannot be overstated in improving your relations with co-workers, customers, and even your family members.  

AI can help you find data and craft messaging to communicate a message, but AI cannot anticipate nor respond to the emotional reactions of those receiving the message. 

Emotions must be considered in all human interactions, and AI has no emotions. 

I pick EQ every time over AI. 

Human – not artificial – relationships 

Developing, maintaining, and growing relationships remains the most important skill in your career. 

Without that ability, you will find yourself working with people who do not know you, do not trust you and do not offer you help.

A lack of strong relationships limits your prospects of advancing within any organization. Your contributions will likely be undervalued or unnoticed. 

You cannot be successful without the ability to work productively with other people. AI will not change the importance of relationships in your job.

AI does not change the need for you to develop relationships with your customers. 

AI will help you understand and extract insights from large customer datasets to help you craft creative messaging, but AI will not change the need for you to speak with your customers and collect information directly from them. 

What about chatbots? Can’t AI chatbots replace the need for human customer support and customer outreach? 

I argue no, AI chatbots cannot and should not replace the human element. AI can help kick off the conversation in some scenarios, but human intervention should always be a part of the equation. 

Many of us hate speaking to robot voices or chatting with bots when trying to reach customer support, but we have to do those things because many businesses have placed reducing costs over human connections. 

Does AI make chatbots and robot voices more believable? 

Some are even “advanced” enough to fool people into thinking they are talking with a human. But to what end?    

AI does not change the need for you to build a genuine relationship with your customers.

Marketers know the importance of customer relationships because, without those relationships, marketers cannot build brands and drive sales.

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Generative AI is the newest and arguably the flashiest tool in recent memory. 

Through its ability to craft creative and copy for marketers, it can remove the human element of our messaging. It can, but in my opinion, it should not.  

If you utilize AI to remove the human element entirely from your messaging, you will create less quality content and miss the uniqueness that humans can only create. 

AI is a tool to help you craft content more efficiently, but it does not replace the need for human content creators. 

Spam is spam whether it is human or AI-created. 

Generative AI’s issues with hallucinations stating incorrect information with confidence are well documented. 

These hallucinations might decrease in time as technology progresses, but AI will never be a perfect source of truth. Imperfect humans create AI tools with imperfect data. 

AI does not replace the need for marketers. AI is just another tool that can be used by marketers to make their jobs easier. 

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Prioritize humans over AI

To be clear, I am not opposed to AI. I use generative AI tools to speed up tasks, brainstorm, conduct research, create rough drafts, etc. 

AI is a great topic for any marketer to learn about and test its various tools. 

However, there are many other arguably more important things you could be doing instead, like improving your EQ, building deeper relationships with your co-workers, and speaking directly to your customers. 

This is not a zero-sum game; your time and energy are finite. Prioritize items that will bring you closer to accomplishing your goals. 

AI can make you more efficient at work, but it should not replace the humanity of your work. 

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