Yes, Another Post About AI and Marketing...

As marketers, we love to say we’re “embracing AI.” Meanwhile, AI is doing something much bigger: it’s reshaping demand itself. Not just the tools we use. Not just the workflows we automate. The actual way people discover, evaluate, and choose products is changing, and marketing, bless it, is still acting like this is a minor software update.

For years, we obsessed over channels. Search. Social. Email. Retail media. The logic was simple: find attention, capture intent, convert demand.

Now AI has entered the chat like an overconfident intern with admin access.

Consumers are increasingly using AI and large language models to help with decision-making, which means demand is now being mediated before a customer even reaches your website, product page, or lovingly overdesigned landing page.

This is where things get awkward.

Source: GIPHY

A lot of companies still treat AI as a productivity hack: automate content, optimize campaigns, speed up reporting, make the dashboard look vaguely futuristic. The real need is orchestration. In other words: if your team is generating more content, more ads, and more “personalized experiences,” but none of it is connected to how demand is actually evolving, then congratulations, you’ve built a faster hamster wheel.

What makes this shift interesting is that AI affects demand before traditional marketing can even get involved. Discovery is changing. Consideration is changing. The language people use to ask questions is changing. The way answers are assembled is changing. So the challenge is no longer just: “How do we rank?”It’s: “How do we remain legible in an environment where machines increasingly interpret brands before humans do?”

A small identity crisis, basically.

If marketing stays out of sync, still polishing campaigns while the mechanics of choice are being rewritten underneath it, then the problem won’t be that AI replaced marketers. It’ll be that marketers were too busy optimizing the old map to notice the territory had changed.