I hear a version of this sentence in a lot of meetings now. "We'll just use AI for the marketing." It is said with confidence, as though the decision is made and the details are trivia. It is not a strategy. It is the absence of one, dressed up as a plan, and I want to explain why plainly, because the businesses that believe it are about to have a hard couple of years.
What AI actually changes
Start with what the technology genuinely does. AI dramatically lowers the cost of producing average work. A competent blog post, a serviceable ad, a passable product description, all of it can now be generated in seconds for almost nothing. That is real, and it is a big shift.
But follow the logic one step further, which is the step most people skip. If everyone can produce average work for free, then average work is worth nothing. Its value collapses precisely because it is no longer scarce. The blog post that used to take an afternoon and mark you as reasonably competent no longer marks you as anything, because your competitor generated a near-identical one over lunch, and so did the twenty businesses next to them.
This is the part "we'll just use AI" misses entirely. It treats cheap production as the prize. But when production gets cheap for you, it gets cheap for everyone at the same moment. You have not gained an advantage. You have joined a crowd, all producing the same forgettable middle, all wondering why none of it is working.
Average is now worthless
Consider what the internet looks like when a million businesses adopt this thinking at once. Every category floods with competent, interchangeable content. Every inbox fills with plausible, generic outreach. Every product page reads like every other product page. The reader's problem is no longer finding information. It is finding anything worth their attention in an ocean of sameness.
In that world, being merely competent is invisible. It is not that competent work becomes bad. It becomes wallpaper. And wallpaper does not win customers, earn links, get remembered or command a price. The floor has risen so fast that standing on it is now standing at the bottom.
So the question for a business owner is not "how do we produce more with AI." Everyone is doing that. The question is "what makes us worth choosing when the baseline is free." That is a strategy question, and no tool answers it for you.
The scarce assets
If average is free, then whatever is not average becomes valuable. What is left when production is commoditised is exactly the stuff AI cannot supply:
- Strategy. A clear, deliberate choice about where you compete, who you serve and what you refuse to do. A model has no stake in your business and cannot make that choice for you.
- Positioning. A sharp, specific reason to pick you over the identical-looking alternative. Not "we're professional and reliable," which everyone claims, but something true and pointed that a competitor could not honestly copy.
- Taste. The judgement to know what is good, what to cut, and when the generated draft is quietly nonsense. Taste is the thing that turns a tool's output into work worth signing your name to.
These are scarce because they come from experience, conviction and the willingness to make a choice and stand behind it. They are the opposite of the average of the internet, and they are the only durable advantage left when production costs fall to zero.
Two ways to use the same tool
Here is the split I see forming, and it will define which businesses thrive. Two companies pick up the same AI tools and go in opposite directions.
The first races to the bottom. AI everything, published unedited, at volume. More posts, more generic emails, more of the same. They mistake output for progress, and they end up as one more indistinguishable voice in a saturated category, competing on price because they have given themselves no other way to compete.
The second uses AI to do distinctive work faster. They still bring the strategy, the point of view and the taste. The tool clears the busywork so their people spend more time on the thinking that actually differentiates them. They produce less, but every piece carries a perspective no competitor can generate, because it comes from who they are, not from a prompt.
Same tool. Opposite outcomes. The difference is not the AI. It is whether there was a strategy underneath it.
The honest conclusion
AI is a genuinely useful tool, and I use it every day. But it is a multiplier of whatever you already have. Point it at a clear strategy and real taste, and it makes good work faster. Point it at nothing, and it makes nothing faster. "We'll just use AI" is a decision to have no strategy while feeling like you have one.
Decide what makes you worth choosing first. If you would like a straight conversation about your positioning before you pour budget into producing more of the average, that is exactly the kind of thinking we would rather help you with than sell you more content nobody asked for.