Lately, I’ve been sitting with the question of where AI belongs in the marketing process and where it doesn’t.
There’s so much excitement (and plenty of noise) around how this new technology can make us faster, more efficient, and even more prolific. I won’t deny that I’ve been swept up in it too. I’m an avid user of AI and see myself as typically an early adopter of new technology. I use it daily. I even used it to help me distill the right questions to craft this newsletter I’m now writing to you.
Each day I marvel at how quickly I can move through tasks that used to take hours. I get time back—real time—which, as any founder knows, is a rare and beautiful thing.
But what I keep coming back to is this: it's what we choose to do with that reclaimed time that truly matters.
Recently, I’ve found myself thinking back to the early days of building my brand. I poured myself into every corner of it - writing newsletters, editing podcasts, updating my website, crafting monthly webinars. There was so much time and so much labor involved, and I doubt I would have the capacity these days to create half of the content I extolled in those early days.
But with that effort also came a kind of intimacy.
I knew my audience because I was in it with them. I wasn’t just creating content—I was deepening connection, opening every email, writing every word that went out to those few folks that had started to follow my work. That level of presence shaped the way I told stories, responded to people, and ultimately built trust as a brand. And I can’t help but wonder what happens when we start outsourcing that part of the process to a machine or some other element of technology.
In one of the founder communities I’m part of, we often swap screenshots of painfully robotic messages - automated LinkedIn comments, cold emails that pitch us on services we already offer, generic outreach that clearly missed the mark. It’s become a bit of a joke at this point, but beneath the humor is a real frustration: these are moments where something that could have sparked connection ends up doing the opposite.
There’s a sacredness to human-to-human engagement. Whether it’s a DM, a blog post, or a comment on someone’s story, there’s a felt difference when someone has taken the time to see you.
And while AI can mimic tone or generate words, it can’t replicate lived experience. It can’t understand what moved you to share about a particular client story, or why a certain sentence in someone else’s post hit you in the gut. It doesn’t know the pause you took before sending something vulnerable. That’s human. That’s heart. That’s still irreplaceable.
And yet, to be clear, as much as I’m entirely over AI-generated comments and inbox onslaughts, I’m not anti-AI. I think it’s a powerful creative companion. It helps me brainstorm, organize, and move from idea to execution more quickly. It’s an amplifier, a helper, a way to streamline the tasks that don’t require my full self.
But I’ve also learned to ask myself: where do the capabilities of this technology end and where does my creativity begin?
That’s the line I try to draw. When it comes to messaging that’s meant to build relationships—especially in values-driven work—I want to stay close to the people we’re aiming to connect with most. I want my voice in the room. And more than anything, I want to protect the parts of our marketing that help people think and feel something. After all, that’s the whole reason we’re writing these newsletters in the first place.
In a world where content is increasingly produced at scale, maybe the real differentiator isn’t how much we can make, but how much we can mean. And maybe the time we save with AI isn’t meant to help us produce more, but to give us the space to show up more fully where it counts.
Because, believe me, people can tell the difference.
Don’t make the mistake of making your marketing powered exclusively by AI or thinking bots are going to be able to spark meaningful connections.
Use these tools in spaces that save time — like editing, outlining, or helping you ideate — so that you can cultivate quality content that your audience can tell comes from a human, heart and all.
- Madeline
