A friendly reminder that “AI-native” is not a personality trait, and your customers still just want you to solve their problems.
Let’s play a game. Scroll through your LinkedIn feed and take a shot every time you see the phrase “AI-Powered.” (Disclaimer: please do not actually do this, as you will be unconscious by lunch.)
It’s everywhere, isn’t it? “AI-Native Solutions.” “Harnessing the Power of AI.” Entire sections of websites are now cordoned off like a VIP lounge for the cool AI kids. It feels like every marketer on the planet got the same memo: Thou Shalt Add AI to Everything.
But in our collective rush to slap an AI sticker on every product, I have to ask: did we all forget how to actually do our jobs?
The “Just Add AI” Fallacy
Here’s the thing: the fundamental rules of marketing haven’t changed. Your customer still has a problem they need to solve. And, brace yourself for a shocker, their problem is not a lack of AI in their life.
Customers are not waking up in a cold sweat thinking, “If only I could infuse more AI into my workflow today!” They’re thinking, “Why is this taking so long?” “Why is this so expensive?” “How can I do this more efficiently?”
AI is a phenomenal new tool to help answer those questions. But it’s the tool, not the solution. Marketing the tool is like a restaurant bragging about its new oven. I don’t care about your oven. I care about the pizza.
Stop Selling the Oven. Sell the Pizza.
The winners of this new era won’t be the companies with the most “AI-Powered” bullet points on their homepage. The winners will be the marketers who can translate the tech-speak into a simple, human value proposition.
The gap in the market today isn’t a lack of AI features. The gap is a lack of imagination in how we apply them.
- Bad Marketing: “Our website now has an AI-powered chat assistant!” (So what? Is it going to do my taxes?)
- Good Marketing: “Ask our assistant to find 3-bedroom homes near the best schools, and it will also tell you about nearby parks and grocery stores.” (Oh, so it saves me two hours of research? Now you have my attention.)
The first sells a feature. The second sells a weekend.
Your New Job Title: AI-to-English Translator
The most effective marketers will become translators. They will take the immense, intimidating cloud of “AI” and distill it into practical, industry-specific playbooks. They will be the ones who can sit down with a retailer and say, “Forget AI for a second. Let’s talk about your supply chain problem. Now, here’s how this new tool can help.”
Our job is to guide customers who feel immense pressure to “do something with AI” but have no idea how to begin. We need to show them how it can help them get to their goals sooner, or how it can transform their customer experience in ways they haven’t even imagined.
And sometimes, our job is to be the adult in the room and say, “You know what? You don’t actually need AI for that.” Because simply embedding an AI chat agent into your website is not a guaranteed path to more qualified leads. Trust me, there’s still a consumer adoption curve, and a bad chatbot is still a bad chatbot, no matter how many “synergistic LLMs” you say it has.
So let’s all take a deep breath. The hype is just that: hype. The marketers who fall for it will find themselves selling empty features. The ones who stay grounded in the fundamentals, who focus on the customer’s problem, who build the use cases, and who sell the pizza, not the oven, are the ones who will not just survive the AI boom, but actually make it mean something.
