Practical AI for Senior Marketers

I’ve been working in marketing long enough to be comfortable with change, but also honest about the fact that none of us ever fully “arrive”. There's always more to learn, and AI is a good example of that. It is moving quickly, it is hard to ignore, and even for experienced practitioners there is still plenty to learn about where it genuinely adds value and where it is just noise.

It's why I joined the recent Marketing Meetup webinar with Kirsty Fraser and Rich Crossley from Movable Ink. The session was warm, curious, and very human, but underneath that tone was a serious question many senior leaders are grappling with: how do you make AI useful without letting it distract, overwhelm, or dilute good marketing practice?

Where Most Marketing Teams Really Are with AI

The session opened with a simple pulse check. Are you sceptical, exploring, building, or already deep into AI driven marketing? Most people landed somewhere in the middle, testing tools, trying to separate substance from hype, and feeling the pace is hard to keep up with.

That framing was important I think, because the message was not that anyone is behind, but that most organisations are still early stage. The focus was on building literacy steadily rather than rushing to “catch up”.

If we consider AI usage in marketing in this way, it becomes less about adoption for its own sake and more about creating confidence and clarity across teams. We need to worry less about the hype and think more about where AI can usefully improve our ways of working.

Importantly for me, that's not just about speed, productivity or saving the business money. AI offers an opportunity for marketers to offer a better service to customers - and as marketing leaders we should be focused there.

A Simple Way to Think About the AI Landscape

It was great to see Rich and Kirsty walk through this exact process. They outlined a clear model for understanding AI capability in three layers, each doing a different job:

• Machine learning was positioned as the optimiser. It looks for patterns in large volumes of data and improves performance over time, for example predicting the best time to send an email based on behaviour.

• Agentic AI sat in the middle as the creator. It can generate content and take action towards an outcome, but only within the guardrails you set.

• Autonomous marketing was described as the manager. This is where systems adjust campaigns end to end in real time, responding to performance without waiting for manual intervention.

The line that stuck with me was simple and practical: use machine learning to optimise, use agents to build. It is a helpful way to cut through vague language and focus on what these tools are actually doing.

From Chatbot to Strategic Teammate

Much of the AI conversation I see online (other than content creation) still centres on chat interfaces, but thankfully Kirsty and Rich went beyond that: they described a progression from reactive assistance, through rule based automation, to agentic systems that work towards a defined goal.

At each stage, the human role shifts rather than disappears. You move from instructor, to architect, to strategist. Even at the most advanced level, humans still set direction, priorities, and values. AI can scale execution, but it cannot decide what should matter in the first place.

That distinction is important, particularly for senior marketers who are responsible for brand, reputation, and long term direction.

Where AI Actually Drives Commercial Value

The strongest commercial argument was also the simplest: AI is most valuable where generic marketing starts to feel like spam.

As a customer, a generic newsletter is often tolerated. But for organisations, a generic offer at a high intent moment is a missed opportunity. AI helps bridge the gap between real time signals, such as behaviour, context, or inventory, and real time decisions about message, timing, product, and channel.

The point was not about sending more, but about reacting faster and more accurately than humans can at scale.

Rethinking Personalisation Without Crossing the Line

A recurring theme was the limitation of traditional segmentation. Segments are static, while people are not. A label cannot tell you if someone is buying a gift, feeling frustrated after a poor service interaction, or suddenly becoming price sensitive.

The distinction Rich and Kirsty articulated so cleanly was between automated marketing and augmented marketing.

When automation lacks empathy, it leads to those familiar moments where brands advertise something you have just bought. When done well, AI supports marketers by spotting patterns while humans keep communications appropriate and human.

Personalisation should feel like service, not surveillance.

What This Means for Marketers and Marketing Leaders

There's a lot of discussion at the moment about whether AI will take marketers' jobs, and the general response usually being "no, but someone who can use AI better than you will." I loved Kirsty and Rich's take on this, where they described AI as a world class sous chef: it can prep at scale, but it does not choose the menu or understand what “on brand” tastes like.

That means the marketer’s value becomes more concentrated in strategy, prioritisation, cultural nuance, brand integrity, trust, and innovation. AI iterates. Humans invent. The future, as they put it, is more human, not less.

Starting Small and Staying Grounded

It was great to be part of a discussion on AI that wasn’t about bold predictions or shiny tools which (literally, as far as AI's concerned) cost the earth.

For me, the webinar reinforced three key things:

• Don't panic and don't overreach.

• Start with one problem, audit the tools you already have, set clear guardrails, and keep testing whether personalisation feels helpful or creepy.

• Use this test and repeat process to build AI literacy so decisions are informed rather than reactive.
  

If you want to make your marketing work harder for you, or you’re curious about using AI in marketing but don’t know where to start, get in touch.