Perspectives
Every marketing leader is fielding the same question right now, usually from someone a few rungs up the org chart: "What are we doing with AI?" It's a fair question asked badly. It starts with the technology and works backward to a usecase, which is exactly the order that produces expensive pilots and not much to show for them.
The trouble with "what are we doing with AI?" is that it has no wrong answer, so it generates motion — but not necessarily progress. Pilots may check boxes, but are they solving problems?
That tension runs through a recent roundup from Adam Mendler, "What Leaders Need to Know About AI," where our co-founder and CEO Marco Matos weighed in alongside CEOs and operators across a range of industries. One point worth repeating to any marketing org: AI is just a tool, and using it for the sake of using it does nothing for you. The teams pulling ahead are the ones working tightly scoped problems with focus, not the ones chasing whatever launched last week.
For performance marketers, that translates cleanly. The pressure to "adopt AI" almost never names an actual problem, and the actual problems aren't hard to find. The constraint most growth teams hit is creative throughput: producing enough variations, and refreshing them often enough, to feed the testing that performance depends on. Name the problem precisely and you get a better question. What's slowing the work, and what would remove it? That's something a marketer can answer, measure, and defend in a budget review.
This is where Marco's point about scope earns its keep. A team that aims AI at one well-defined bottleneck, ties it to a metric it already reports on, and judges it by whether that metric moves will learn something real in a quarter. A team that buys a platform because the category is hot learns mostly that the category is hot.
Scoping well isn't complicated, but it is specific. It means picking the bottleneck you'd name in a QBR anyway, deciding upfront which metric proves it moved, and giving the team a real deadline to find out. A creative team drowning in variation requests doesn't need an AI strategy. It needs to produce and refresh enough content to keep its testing pipeline fed, and a tool that measurably does that earns its place. One that doesn't should be cut. The scope is what makes the verdict obvious.
The discipline is unglamorous, and it rarely makes for a splashy all-hands announcement. What it makes for is a marketing org that gets measurably sharper each quarter while driving real business results. The leaders who come out ahead keep asking what business outcome the tool is supposed to serve, and they walk when there isn't a clear answer.
