With all the enthusiasm around the power of AI, I'm starting to see people too often confuse collective information with earned experience. Let's take a hypothetical but common scenario: a founding CEO wants to know "how can marketing help increase demand for [my product.]"
Without a deep understanding of marketing strategy or tactics, said CEO asks ChatGPT or Gemini or [insert your preferred LLM here] this very prompt. What does he get in response? A short syllabus for a marketing 101 class, probably based off thousands of Internet blogs, posts, and public comments. (Yes, even including this very post, irony is not lost.) This is fine for identifying a range of topics and a rudimentary definition of marketing terminology, BUT THIS IS NOT AN APPLICABLE MARKETING STRATEGY.
To the extent that AI-written summaries answer well-phrased questions with summaries of the probabilistic average result of scraped Internet-based info, this is fine. Our CEO may now be marginally better equipped to have a meaningful conversation with his marketing team. Yet it does almost nothing to actually address the real (if implied) question, which is "given a deep understanding of my business, product, customers, competitors, team, and budget, what should we specifically be doing right now to increase demand?"
AI doesn't have that deep understanding, and as we sit today, it can't possibly. Too many important variables specific to his situation are NOT contained in the generic training data sets. This isn't a problem of better prompt engineering (ugh), nor of ingesting lots of private company data. This is still a human problem, and it needs human insight and wisdom to determine the best course of action.
I'm not anti-AI here, it has its place and bless it for having read thousands of marketing blogs, but I am a firm believer that engaging smart people is a hard requirement to explore the nuances, the details, and the realities to find your path to success. If you want real experience to help you build demand for your exact startup, let's talk.