MarTech: AI commoditizes marketing execution and elevates judgment

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for MarTech. Read the full article here

As AI promises to automate 90% of your administrative tasks, are you ready to stake your brand’s future on the remaining 10% — the high-value human judgment machines can’t replicate?

With enterprise AI adoption maturing from mass experimentation to results-driven, with marketing leadership being asked to prove ROI, marketing organizations are encountering what could be called the second-order risks of rapid scaling. The biggest one for many is the phenomenon of workslop, or the low-quality output generated by employees pushed to deliver massive amounts of AI-generated content without enough time for quality checks.

While AI can automate a vast majority of repetitive administrative tasks, a counterintuitive and growing need for marketing leaders is now becoming an emphasis on human empathy, creativity and strategic judgment. To win, leaders must treat AI as a collaborator that interrogates strategy rather than an autopilot that dilutes brand integrity, all while respecting the value of human judgment.

It takes humans to define AI slop

It’s hard to avoid AI slop these days, and it stems from giving marketing teams the wrong incentives to meet increasingly aggressive output goals. While much of the initial conversation regarding AI focused on investment and upside potential, there’s a cost to all of the content created, much of which is detrimental to the brand.

Workslop, which you’ve no doubt experienced as either a consumer or an employee, is the proliferation of low-quality, generic output that occurs when marketing teams are pressured to use AI to deliver more volume with less time allocated to quality control and critical thinking. 

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for MarTech. Read the full article here