AI Is Smart. That Doesn’t Mean It Should Be Your Strategist.

AI Is Smart. That Doesn’t Mean It Should Be Your Strategist.

I read an article recently where someone proudly announced that AI had created their entire marketing strategy. At first glance, it sounds impressive. Faster, it's easier, it's cheaper. But my first thought wasn't, oh, my God, this is brilliant. It was this could be an absolute disaster. If you don't know marketing strategy yourself, how do you know whether what AI gives you is good, bad, or completely made up. AI is an incredible tool. I use it every day. But here's the mistake I see people making. They are treating AI like a strategist when it's really an assistant. It is a thought partner. Those are two very different roles. And that's what I'm going to dig into in today's episode.

Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we help companies turn client acquisition from their biggest challenge into their biggest advantage. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in today. I am really excited to dig into this. There are three main things I'm going to talk about in this episode. One, AI is a tool, not a strategist. I'm going to talk about why experience and judgment still matter, and how do you pressure test AI if you're not an expert.

AI Is A Tool, Not A Strategist

So first off, AI is a tool, not a strategist. AI can process information incredibly fast. It can generate ideas almost instantly. It can save hours of work. These are all great things, and we should be leveraging the tool. But AI doesn't know your customers the way you should. It doesn't have the experience, right? And with experience comes judgment. It lacks judgment, right? It predicts the next likely answer based on patterns. AI has a ton of information But it's looking for patterns. It doesn't have experience. It doesn't have judgment. We still need humans for that. I want you to think about this, right? Giving AI the job of creating your entire marketing driving strategy is like handing a 16-year-old the keys to a Ferrari. The car is incredibly powerful. That doesn't mean they're ready to drive it. They don't have the experience to drive a car like that. They lack the good judgment of how to actually utilize a tool like that. Strategy always comes first. AI can absolutely help build the engine. Frankly, it can be a good thought partner for you, but it shouldn't be deciding where you're driving. You can bounce ideas off of it, but that final call, based on your judgment, your experience, needs to come from you and not AI itself.

Why Experience And Judgment Still Matter

So let's dig into why experience and judgment still matter. Because they do, and this is really important, giving... So here's what AI cannot replace. Pattern recognition from years of experience. Understanding nuances, right? Those little subtle details. Making trade offs, knowing when conventional advice doesn't apply to you. AI can't do that. Think about it, a ton of people are using AI for medical advice, okay? But AI makes stuff up sometimes. Odds are you're going to get a lot of really good information out of it. But if you're not a doctor, how do you know that the information that you're getting is actually accurate? You don't. You need to have that judgment and that experience to be able to determine whether the the information you're getting is valid. So from a marketing standpoint, AI might recommend that you target broadly a bunch of people. Be active on every social platform, publish daily content, lower your price is to compete. But how do you know that's right for your business? It might be right in general, but how do you know it's right for your specific business. There is no one size fits all marketing plan. Your marketing needs to be custom to your business based on where you are, what your resources are, what you want to accomplish, your end goals. All of those things need to be taken into account. And if they're not, odds are you're not getting a really good output. Marketing is not about finding one right answer. It's about making good decisions based on your specific business. Most B2B tech businesses don't need more tactics. They're already overwhelmed with tactics. What they need is clarity about which tactics actually fit their business right now. That's where the experience and judgment comes in. You can pop into AI and tell it what you do, and it's going to spit out all kinds of information. But if you lack the experience to be able to apply a strong judgment to that, you may just get a list of random tactics that aren't any good for your business or don't make sense for your business.

How Do You Pressure Test AI If You Are Not An Expert

So how do you pressure test AI if you are not an expert? I'm going to give you some tips here that may be helpful. But obviously, look, I'm biased because as a revenue growth partner, we help clients build their growth and their marketing engines. So I'm biased. But think about this from any other perspective. Think about it from the doctor perspective or an accountant or a lawyer. If you are not one of those people, there's no way that you can properly pressure test the output that you're getting. You still need somebody that knows what the hell they're doing to help you make heads or tails of the information that you're getting so that you can move forward with clarity and start building momentum by focusing on the right things for your business. But I'm going to give you some ideas of how to pressure test AI when you're not an expert.

So if you don't have years of marketing experience, or frankly, if it's not marketing, if you don't have years of accounting or legal experience or whatever it may be, how do you know if AI is giving I'm giving you good advice? The answer is, honestly, you probably don't know. And that's not a criticism. It's just a reality. I'm in that situation too, when I'm putting information in and asking AI for advice or guidance or asking it to share its thoughts. That's just the way it is. Let me give you a few ways to pressure test.

First thing is ask AI to argue against its own recommendations. Ask it, what are three reasons this strategy or your recommendations could fail? Give me some great advice here. What are three reasons why this could fail? Argue against why I wouldn't want to do what you just recommended.

Second thing you can do is ask for assumptions, right? What assumptions are you making about my business in providing this advice? And that's another great way to gain insight into what it is thinking and how it is making, what it's making its recommendations based upon. Because if it's making those recommendations based upon things that aren't accurate, that's a problem. This happened to me a while ago. I was actually, and I'm still working through this, but I wanted to put together a new diet and workout routine. And I told it what I wanted, what my goals were. But guess what happened as I started working through it? My definition of what my goal was was different from ChatGPT's in this case. And it was making recommendations upon what it thought not what my goal meant, but what my goal meant to me was different than what it meant. And once we got on the same page with that, it shifted its recommendations. So it's really important to pressure test this stuff.

Third thing you can do is request alternatives. What are three completely different strategies or tactics that I could look at to approach this?

Number four, compare the advice to marketing fundamentals or whatever the discipline fundamentals are. In the case of marketing, does it clearly define who you're targeting, what the problem, what problem you solve, why you're different, how you'll consistently generate leads? If not, this is probably like tactics disguised as strategy. Is what it is recommending based on the fundamentals? Are the fundamentals involved or considered in the advice that it's given? Because no matter what the discipline is, whether it's marketing or something else, if you do not have the fundamentals nailed down, you got things out of sequence. It is not going to work.

And the fifth thing that you can do is run major decisions by someone with experience. That's why advisors like me exist within any discipline. This is where advisors, mentors, experienced coaches become incredibly valuable. AI gives you options. Experience helps you choose. Someone like me can help you take that information and make the right choices from it.

Look, I think the best way is to use AI. I love AI. I use it all the time. Where AI shines is research, brainstorming, acting as a thought partner, first drafts, organizing ideas, summarizing information, repurposing content, speeding up execution. But where I think people get into trouble is letting AI make strategic decisions. To make strategic decisions, you have to have experience and judgment. AI does not have those two things, at least right now. Accepting answers without questioning them. Should always be questioning the answers that you're getting out of AI. And confusing speed with wisdom. Just because AI can spit something out quickly doesn't mean that there is wisdom in the information that you're actually getting.

So I've I got one more analogy for you. AI is like hiring the world's fastest intern. It can do incredible work, but you still need an experienced manager reviewing the work before it goes out the door. So no matter what the discipline, whether it's marketing or something else, you need to have somebody with experience and judgment helping you pressure test the information. Otherwise, you are bound to go down a path and 6, 9, 12 months down the road go, Well, I followed the AI's advice, but it's still not working. Yeah, it's not working because something was missing and you need an expert to help guide you through that.

Conclusion

So I hope you found this helpful. The AI is changing so fast and so rapidly. A lot of us are just we're using it, we're testing it, but nobody's got it all figured out. I don't have it all figured out. You don't either. But I hope this information that I'm sharing just helps you think about it a little bit differently, because I see so many people saying, well, I'll just put it into AI and use AI to do this rather than paying somebody to help me do this. And I think in a lot of cases, that is a huge mistake. And hopefully this episode has helped you gain at least a better understanding of why that might be the case. So thank you so much for listening. If you remember one thing from today's episode, just remember this, AI doesn't eliminate the need for strategy. It actually makes strategy more valuable than ever. The better your judgment, the better your AI results are going to be. And if you don't have that judgment yet, don't let AI make the important decisions for you. Use it to make better decisions, not replace them. So thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing. If you feel like you are doing all the recommend marketing stuff, but you are still not seeing results, you're stuck in the marketing needs, and if you want to get your roadmap out, I want you to head on over to marketingenginescorecard.com to find out exactly what's keeping your marketing engine from delivering consistent growth. Takes less than 2 minutes, so go do it now, marketingenginescorecard.com. And if you want to connect with us, you can also always do that at rialtomarketing.com. That's rialtomarketing.com. And until next time, take care.