The irony of AI
It's 2016 and you've just spent the day wrestling with an Excel marketing plan. Formulas are breaking, cells are formatting themselves for no apparent reason, and somewhere on the spreadsheet a mysterious #REF! error has appeared. Tomorrow morning's task is to write EM2 for the sponsor database and, if there's time, update a campaign report before the end of the day.
If someone had told us then that, within ten years, we'd be able to ask an AI tool to build a marketing plan, create a reporting dashboard or draft an email in a matter of seconds, most marketers would have bitten your hand off. Think of all the time we'd save!
And yet, here we are...
We can write emails faster, summarise meetings instantly, analyse data in seconds and build presentations in a fraction of the time it once took. Tasks that would previously have occupied an entire afternoon can now be completed before we've finished our first coffee. But when I speak to fellow marketers, very few tell me they have more time on their hands. In fact, most seem just as busy as they always were.
The irony of AI is that while it has undoubtedly made us more productive, it hasn't necessarily made marketers jobs easier. If an email can be written in ten minutes rather than an hour, we'll send more emails. If reporting takes thirty minutes rather than half a day, we'll produce more reports. If content can be created faster, we'll create more content. The time saved rarely becomes spare time, instead, expectations simply increase.
Of course, that doesn't mean AI should be doing all the work. While it can be incredibly useful for getting started, speeding up research or helping structure a first draft, the best marketing still relies on human judgement. AI doesn't know your audience as well as you do, it doesn't understand the conversations you've had with customers, and it can't always tell the difference between content that is merely correct and content that is genuinely compelling. As more brands embrace AI generated content, consumers are becoming increasingly adept at spotting generic copy, making originality more important than ever.
But the days of Mad Men are long gone and marketers in 2026 aren't spending half the day in the office before heading to the pub. Most are managing multiple channels, creating more content than ever, attending more meetings, analysing more data and responding to more stakeholders than their predecessors could have imagined.
AI has of course changed marketing. It has made many tasks quicker, easier and more accessible. But perhaps the biggest irony is that despite all the time we're supposed to be saving, very few of us seem to have any more of it. And as more content becomes AI generated, the marketers who can add genuine insight, experience and originality may become even more valuable than before.
At Nicklin Marketing Group, we work with businesses to strengthen marketing performance through strategy, structure, and specialist execution, helping teams scale smarter, not just spend bigger.