AI-assisted market, competitor, audience, and client research synthesis

Every day, I come across posts saying, "AI is going to replace marketers."
I don't agree.

What AI is really replacing is the time we spend on repetitive tasks.

Instead of spending hours on research, brainstorming, or writing the first draft,

AI helps me get started much faster.

Here's how I use AI in my daily work:

- To research a new industry or understand a client's business.
- To come up with content ideas when I'm planning a month's content.
- To create different versions of ad copy for testing.
- To brainstorm hooks for reels and LinkedIn posts.
- To summarise reports and spot trends quickly.

Does that mean AI does all the work?
Not at all.

It still can't understand your customers like you can.
It doesn't know your business goals.

It can't build trust with your audience or make the final marketing decisions for you.

That's still our job.

The marketers who will grow aren't the ones who avoid AI.

They're the ones who know how to use it wisely.
Think of AI as your assistant, not your replacement.

It helps you work faster, but your experience, creativity, and strategy are what make the real difference.

How are you using AI in your work today? What's one task it has made easier for you?

Am I earning less as a freelancer due to AI? That's a hard YES. But not in the way you would think..
.

I'm still charging roughly the same day rates as I used to five years ago. But.. I am SO MUCH more efficient now using AI that it takes about half the time now to deliver.

Campaigns that would have taken six to eight weeks to get to market, are now ready in a month.

What this means for my clients is that they save valuable marketing budget and delight their stakeholders. What it means for me is that I need more projects! (bummer 🙄).

Word of note. How I use AI doesn't result in producing soulless and bland narrative. I still write my own headlines and creative copy. How I do use AI is for project management and time consuming tasks such as researching a buying persona's pain points and decision journey.

I recently onboarded a new client, Ativion, in the EdTech space. Normally I would be what Cisco call "drinking from the fire hose" during the first week. With AI to help me with research and summaries, I hit the ground running and started delivering on my second day! I couldn't have done that five years ago.

Is AI is taking my role away in the future? Quite possibly. Who can tell. 🤷

But until it does, I'm going to leverage it to scale projects and create efficiencies that benefit my clients and keeps them coming back.

Thanks for listening. ❤️

Curious? https://lucifer.marketing/

Here's how i use AI to execute faster as a marketing professional


AI is not just one tool.

It's a collection of tools that can be integrated into your workflow to help you execute faster and more efficiently.

For brainstorming and strategy around my campaign ideas, content pillars, messaging angles, customer personas, or content calendars?

I use ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.

For research and insights
I use Perplexity.

It's great for pulling information from multiple sources, summarizing reports, and finding data points much faster than traditional search.

For designs
I use Canva AI most times…
I recently discovered Gamma and the secret to prompting right with ChatGPT for clean designs.
Midjourney is also a great option.

For presentations
I Use Gamma.

For automation
Zapier, Make, or n8n are great options.

With these I’m able to automate repetitive tasks so i spend less time on manual work and more time on high value activities.

The goal isn't to let AI do all the work.

The goal is to spend less time on execution and more time on thinking, creativity, strategy, and decision making.

That's how you win.

Which AI tool has become a regular part of your workflow lately?

There's one simple reason why Fibbler has been crushing it from the start... and it doesn't involve the word "AI" or "agent."

I log into LinkedIn every day.

I scroll through the feed.

7 out of 10 posts are about AI and how to grow your company faster using it.

Rarely any proof points behind the frameworks or tactics.

Just doomsday prophecies about a dying marketing function because AI can do it for you.

I have a very contrarian view.

MARKETERS HAVE NEVER BEEN MORE IMPORTANT.

And yes, I use AI a lot in my own work.

Research, content, coding.

But none of that is why Fibbler has been successful.

It's because we have a narrative people resonate with.

One that stems from my own POV on marketing.

And we've been effective at distributing that narrative through my existing audience, through ads, and through word of mouth.

I would have done the exact same things without any AI.

Maybe it would have taken slightly longer.

But the results would be the same.

AI makes good marketers more efficient. It doesn't create great marketing.

That's still about the same thing it's always been.

Finding and engaging the right people, so that when they're eventually ready to buy, you're the one who comes to mind.

“AI CMO” posts are starting to annoy me.

Higgsfield launched Supercomputer and people are already framing it as a marketer you hire once: one prompt, it studies TikTok, Meta ads, X, analytics, then ships new content while you sleep.

That sounds great in a post. But the expensive part of marketing was never opening 14 tabs.

The expensive part is judgment.

Who decides the strategy? Who knows when a hook is clever but wrong for the customer? Who has enough pattern recognition to catch the 20% of an LLM answer that’s off before it costs the company real money?

Neil and I were talking about the Grand Theft Auto CEO’s point on AI. Thousands of games can get made every year. Only a few become hits. More output doesn’t replace taste.

Same thing with a CMO.

AI will replace pieces of the marketing workflow: research, ideation, creative variations, reporting, first drafts, analysis.

But someone with real experience still has to know what to ask for, what to ignore, and what to kill.

AI doesn’t make the CMO obsolete.

It makes weak judgment more expensive and strong judgment more scalable.

The more I use AI in marketing work, the more convinced I am that the real differentiator is not the tool.

It’s judgment.
AI is incredibly useful when it is applied to the right parts of the workflow.

Things like:
• surfacing account signals
• summarizing patterns
• accelerating research
• testing messaging angles
• turning raw inputs into a first draft
• shortening the time from insight to action
That is real leverage.

But AI is not equally useful everywhere.
It does not fix weak positioning.
It does not replace strategic context.
It does not make messy data reliable.
It does not tell you what matters if you have not defined what good looks like.

That is where I think marketing leaders need to be much sharper.

The real skill is knowing:
what to automate
what to review
what to challenge
what to ignore
and where human judgment still needs to lead

That is also why more output is not always a win.
More content.
More campaigns.
More automation.
None of that matters if the underlying thinking is weak.

AI does not remove the need for strong marketers.
But it absolutely raises the bar for them.

And to me, that is the real shift behind “AI-first marketing.”
Not more tools.
Better decision loops.

Curious how others are thinking about this.

Here are a few ways we are leveraging AI to assist with sales and marketing (plus a few ways not to use AI). Do you have anything you would add to either list?

First, let’s dive into how you should NOT be using AI.

- Stop using AI to create all your content. Several colleagues have shared data showing engagement levels plummet for social media and website content created by AI. Engagement across all platforms. It is ok to use AI to help, but you MUST edit this content with a qualified human. A good rule of thumb is that the more important the content, the more editing it will require.

- Stop using AI to send important emails. The content generated by AI is clearly not human. People can subconsciously tell, if not outright. This sends a signal to the person you are emailing that you don’t care enough to write them yourself.

- Stop using AI to create all your content images. Again, let’s think about this from the perspective of how important your content is. Simple post, sure, if that post needs an image. But adding an image for the sake of it is not effective.

Here are a few amazing ways to use AI for sales and marketing:

- Start using AI to inspire your content, emails, posts, research, and more. AI can be a great assistant in helping you identify opportunities you may miss. This is mostly done in the conversational side of AI.

- Start using AI to do the mundane tasks. With a simple Claude Code .md file (Google this if you don’t know what it is), I was able to create a file where I insert a URL into Claude Code, and it creates a csv of names, emails, LinkedIn profiles, and bios of all the decision makers. Saves a ton of time.

- Start using AI to set up automated low-touchpoint interactions. Rather, this is online chat or surface-level emails; create AI agents that help you knock out 80% of the work in low-impact, high-volume interactions.

- Start using AI for marketing and sales processes and plans. AI is amazing at creating frameworks and rubrics for marketing and sales. Think of AI like a junior employee here. The output is solid, but requires some changes and additions. Use AI for editorial calendars, campaign plans, road maps, and more.

- Start using AI for research. Competitive research, new market options, market size, scope, areas of opportunity, your own campaigns, etc. AI can be a powerful research assistant. You need to be careful to properly structure the research, so AI doesn’t just give you answers you want to hear.

I use AI. There, I said it.

As a personal branding agency, it’s impossible to expand or diversify your clientele without AI workflows.

I have fed 100+ interviews to train my Claude for each client. It knows exactly what news, articles, and Reddit threads to pick for each client’s content.

But before and after this, AI is absolutely useless. It cannot tell you what questions to ask, how to create a comfort bubble for a person so they can unabashedly share their opinions.

It cannot form a bond with the person you’re writing for. And *drum rolls* AI CANNOT WRITE. If I were to send a fully AI-generated post to my client, they’d think a potato wrote it.

The hooks are bad. There are unnecessary rhetorics and similes. It cannot form a single sentence without robbing the person of their personality.

You need a writer even if tomorrow you chose to use AI for all your posts. Because honey, writers know how to stop the scroll. Writers know how deep or far the reader has to be taken into the story.

I have had the same clients for years and it’s not because I’ve made them the Elon Musks of social media. It’s because I work too closely with their long-term goals, I safeguard their image, I’m a mini PR. Some would say I’m their therapist too lol.

Personal branding, my nugget, is 80% process and 20% posts. Posts are the laaaassssst part. The backbone of any process is always a person who has been there, done that.

Even the best vibecoders have breathed, lived, and died in code first.

Most marketers are using AI wrong.

They ask it to write captions and stop there.

Here's how I use AI to run smarter marketing campaigns — without losing the human touch:

1. Research in minutes, not days
AI helps me analyze competitor positioning, audience pain points, and market trends before I write a single word of copy.

2. Build the strategy first, then generate content
I feed AI my target audience, goals, and tone — then use it to draft content frameworks, not finished posts. The thinking stays mine.

3. Repurpose everything
One blog post → 5 captions → 3 email hooks → 1 short video script. AI makes this take 20 minutes instead of 3 hours.

4. Test faster
I run A/B variations on headlines and CTAs using AI-generated options, then let performance data pick the winner.

5. Personalize at scale
From outreach emails to ad copy, AI lets me tailor messaging to different audience segments without starting from scratch each time.

The marketers winning right now aren't the ones replacing their thinking with AI.
They're the ones using AI to think bigger.

Which of these do you already use? Drop it in the comments 👇

#MarketingStrategy #AIMarketing #DigitalMarketing #ContentMarketing #MarketingTips

After a year of building AI into my workflow, here’s what I didn’t expect to find, and what it forced me to confront about the work I’d been calling “strategy.”