Can AI Kick Our Douchebag-Egocentric Marketin A**es?

July 10, 2024

Imagine this: a marketing department running entirely on bots. No humans. Just AI agents working non-stop—crunching data, crafting campaigns, and making decisions faster than you can brainstorm a tagline. On the surface, it sounds revolutionary. But before we pop the champagne on the death of human-driven marketing, let’s ask the real question: are we actually at a point where AI can replace us, or are we just looking at the most advanced assistant we’ve ever had?

Andrew Ng, co-founder of Google Brain and an undisputed leader in AI, has been championing the potential of multi-agent frameworks. These aren’t sci-fi pipe dreams. They’re real systems that leverage multiple specialized agents—often powered by older Large Language Models (LLMs)—to reason through problems collaboratively. The kicker? They can sometimes outsmart the latest single-model systems that everyone’s obsessed with. So, are these frameworks the future of marketing departments? Or is this just the next shiny object we’re all drooling over while clinging to our job titles?

AI’s Marketing Overhaul: Product, Pricing, Placement

AI isn’t nibbling at the edges of marketing—it’s tearing up the rulebook and rewriting it from scratch. The core pillars—product, pricing, and placement—are no longer untouchable.

Products Built by Data: Forget brainstorming sessions and intuition-led product development. AI digs into customer feedback, market trends, and behavioral patterns with precision that makes human analysis look like guesswork. It doesn’t just tell you what customers want; it spots opportunities you didn’t even know existed. Need to launch faster? AI shortens the development cycle, cutting down waste and delivering what people crave before anyone else can.
Pricing with Precision: Pricing strategies have always been a mix of art and science—until now. AI turns pricing into an exact science. It tracks competitor moves in real time, reacts to demand spikes before they happen, and adjusts pricing dynamically, ensuring you’re always in the sweet spot between competitive and profitable. Think surge pricing on steroids, but tailored to your entire product line.
Placement Done Right: AI doesn’t just figure out where your products need to go; it optimizes how they get there. From streamlining supply chains to choosing the perfect shelf placement or digital ad position, AI ensures your product shows up at the right time, in the right place, with no wasted effort or resources.

`AI isn’t just a tool for marketers—it’s flipping the whole damn table.`

Go-to-Market: Now with AI Superpowers

Launching a product used to mean endless planning meetings, manual data crunching, and hope. Now? AI slices through all of that. It analyzes historical data, predicts what will work, and identifies who’s most likely to buy. Not in weeks or months, but in minutes.

And leads? AI doesn’t just generate them—it qualifies them, scores them, and ranks them by priority. Your sales team gets a list that’s essentially a money printer, turning cold prospects into warm opportunities without lifting a finger.

But here’s where it gets really interesting: AI doesn’t stop after the launch. It keeps learning. It personalizes every interaction, delivering experiences that make customers feel seen. Netflix isn’t just suggesting what to watch—it’s reshaping your expectations, training you to trust its recommendations more than your own instincts. That’s the level of personalization AI can bring to any brand bold enough to embrace it.

Reasoning at Scale: The Multi-Agent Framework

Let’s talk about multi-agent frameworks, the next big thing in AI. These aren’t single systems doing everything poorly. They’re teams of specialized agents, each focused on a specific task—audience segmentation, campaign optimization, SEO, you name it. And when these agents collaborate, something magical happens: they don’t just execute; they reason.

Collaborative Problem-Solving: Imagine this: an agent notices your engagement rates are tanking. It doesn’t just report the problem—it signals other agents. One adjusts your messaging, another tweaks pricing, and a third reevaluates your distribution strategy. Together, they don’t just fix the issue—they solve it holistically.
Scenario Simulations at Lightning Speed: Multi-agent systems don’t test one idea at a time; they simulate dozens of strategies simultaneously. They calculate outcomes, weigh the trade-offs, and choose the best path forward—all before you’ve had your morning coffee.
Adaptation in Real Time: When market conditions shift, agents don’t just sit there waiting for instructions. They recalibrate. If a campaign flops, they don’t panic—they pivot. They’re dynamic, adaptive, and always learning.

This isn’t just automation. This is reasoning at scale. It’s AI stepping into the realm of strategic thinking—amplifying what we can achieve.

So if AI can reason and adapt, what’s left for us? Let’s talk about where humans still have the edge—or do we?

Why Humans Aren’t Out of the Job Yet

AI can do a lot—analyze, predict, even create—but is marketing purely about data, or is there still something uniquely human that it can't yet touch? Emotion. Humanity. Those are still taboo for Ai models. It doesn’t understand why a quirky meme goes viral or why a tear-jerking story resonates more than a perfectly crafted slogan.

GPTs might write headlines that work, but does it truly understand why one resonates more than another? I have to brainstorm for hours before I can generate a good one. And most of the time, AI creates that spark, but does not write my text. It can optimize pricing, but it doesn’t know when it’s more valuable to leave money on the table to build goodwill. It can mimic creativity, but it doesn’t have vision. And it's getting repetitive, but here the word comes again: YET! YET! YET!

Right now, AI is impressive. It’s still grounded in what we’ve fed it—our data, our insights, our rules. It’s not dreaming up ideas out of thin air. It’s reflecting our imagination back at us, just faster and shinier.

The question isn’t whether AI can replace us—it’s whether we’ll use it to see what we’ve been missing.

Here’s the truth: the brands that thrive won’t pick sides. They won’t ask, “Humans or AI?” They’ll figure out how to blend the two. AI can handle the grind—the data crunching, the scaling, the processes.