AI Can Tell You What’s Wrong. It Still Can’t Tell You What’s Next.
If you spent any part of the last few months in an AI-and-creativity debate, you already know the split. Half the industry is convinced AI is the future of the work. The other half wants everyone to step back from the tools and make something human again. I laid out why I think that framing misses the point in a piece for LBB Online, “AI Can Tell You What’s Wrong. It Still Can’t Tell You What’s Next.”
The short version: “protect human creativity” is the comfortable answer, and it’s also a losing one. It loses to the spreadsheet, because AI is faster and cheaper and no CFO has ever been swayed by the word “human.” And it loses on its own terms, because most human-made work is competent and forgettable too — a bad ad made by a person is still a bad ad. The real edge isn’t creativity alone, it’s judgment: the willingness to make a bold, culturally specific bet before any dashboard can validate it. AI is extraordinary at the measurable part of the job. It cannot move first on something the data hasn’t seen yet, because nothing in the data says “this is the move” until after it’s already worked.
I got to keep unpacking that idea recently as a guest on Peak Bound Studio’s Podcast, where we went deeper into what “judgment” actually looks like day to day — how you build the muscle to make a bet you can’t yet prove, and why so many teams have trained that instinct out of themselves in the name of rigor. If the LBB piece is the thesis, that conversation is the “okay, but how” that follows it.
Which brings me to why I’m writing this now instead of just linking the article on its own.
This same question — what AI changes, and what it still can’t do for us — is exactly what we’re getting into at AMA SF’s Tech Week event, “From Possibility to Practice: Marketing in the AI Era.” It’s happening at Quantcast HQ, and the conversation is split the same way the industry’s debate has been: one panel on the shift AI has already created, one on the practice of actually putting it to work inside real organizations, followed by rooftop networking to argue about it further with a drink in hand.
I’m plugging it here for a simple reason: it’s the same conversation, live and in the room, with people who are living the “AI can tell you what’s wrong, now what” problem inside their own marketing orgs every day. As President of AMA SF and AVP, Digital at Mekanism, I’ve had a hand in shaping this one, and it’s the natural next step after the article and the podcast — less “here’s a take,” more “let’s work through it together.”
If any of this resonates, I’d love to see you there.
Get your ticket to AMA SF’s Tech Week event →
Read the full LBB piece: AI Can Tell You What’s Wrong. It Still Can’t Tell You What’s Next.
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