“Are You Using AI?” Is the Wrong Question. And It’s Killing Strategic Thinking.
The most misleading question in marketing right now?
“Are you using AI?”
It’s framed like a binary litmus test: you’re either forward-thinking or falling behind. But this simplification masks a much deeper problem. The current discourse around AI in digital marketing has become a strawman argument. It sets up a false choice; use it or don’t, lead with it or don’t – as if adoption alone is the answer.
That’s not strategy. That’s posturing.
The Real Conversation You Should Be Having
The real challenge isn’t whether or not you “use AI.” It’s how you’re integrating it into a system that drives outcomes—creatively, operationally, and financially. Are you using AI to accelerate insight? To restructure workflows? To automate non-essential complexity so your team can operate at a higher strategic altitude?
Those are real, thorny, systems-level questions. And they require a maturity of thinking that goes far beyond “AI = good” or “AI = risk.”
Because here’s the truth: AI doesn’t fix bad strategy. It accelerates it. If your marketing is misaligned, AI will just get you to irrelevance faster.
A Better Framework: Operational Maturity + Strategic Leverage
To get past the strawman, we need a better framework:
- Operational Maturity – Can your org actually integrate AI into workflows in a way that compounds performance? If your internal systems are broken, throwing AI into the mix won’t fix them. It’ll just create more fragmented outputs, faster.
- Strategic Leverage – Are you using AI to extend human creativity and insight, or are you automating for the sake of it? The highest-leverage teams I know use AI to create more space for thinking—not to replace it.
- Executive Literacy – Are decision-makers fluent in what AI can and can’t do? If not, you’ll get a lot of vendor hype and not a lot of organizational transformation.
The Implication: It’s Not About Tools, It’s About Capacity
The deeper question isn’t “are you using AI”—it’s “what kind of organization are you building as a result of AI?”
That’s the level we need to be operating on. Not performative thought leadership. Not tech theater.
AI isn’t a yes/no checkbox. It’s a force multiplier. And like all multipliers, it depends on the quality of what you feed it.
If you’re an organizational leader trying to navigate AI, we’re here to help.To share frameworks, battle scars, or establish a way to pressure-test your approach. Reach out here.
