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Hello and welcome back. Episode eleven, legs eleven. I made the career change into marketing from pharmacy, and when I did, plenty of people asked me whether there would even be a job in marketing given the way AI is going. So this week we are continuing the AI conversation and tackling that question head on. Should you be worried, and what should your business actually be using this stuff for?
Is marketing about to be replaced?
Short answer, no. Longer answer, it depends on what kind of marketing you do.
AI is genuinely better than marketers at a lot of things. The catch is that those things were never the great marketer’s job in the first place. They were the tasks around the edges, the process-driven work that used to get handed to offshore teams: do A, get B, follow these instructions. That work did not require understanding the difference between CNC machining and fabrication or grasping why two WA audiences behave differently. As Mel puts it, “I don’t think AI is going to kill marketing. I think that AI is going to kill crap marketing.”
The emotional intelligence, the nuance, the curiosity, that is the part that survives. The repeatable, disconnected tasks are the part that disappears.
Where AI earns its keep for a small business
Three uses stand out for the kind of businesses we work with.
Content is the big winner, but only if you put the work in. Throw a vague request at a tool, and the output is awful. Invest the time to build a custom bot that understands your voice and your market, and it becomes genuinely useful. We build LinkedIn bots for our clients so they can write in their own language without paying us to do it every time, which is a nice sticky product that comes with the service.
Image creation is Mel’s current favourite. For a WA business, getting good imagery used to mean two painful options: book a shoot and try to get a videographer onto a tier one mine site that was not even yours, or settle for the same stock photos everyone else uses. Now, a service vehicle photographed on a green farm can be dropped into the red dust of a mine site in about fifteen to twenty minutes of prompting. We did exactly that for an agricultural and service vehicle client, and the owner looked at it and asked how we got the trailer there. We did not, mate. That is AI. For a small business gutsing it out every day, removing that expense is a real game changer.
Data is the third. Analysing every lead for a client, deciding whether each one was qualified, and reporting it back to prove return on investment used to be brutally manual work. AI now does the grunt work of that analysis, which has changed the shape of our team considerably while letting us keep our promise that if we say we return ROI on marketing, we actually return ROI on marketing.
The 80/20 of it
The way Mel describes the split is useful. To get a job done to one hundred per cent, you still need about twenty per cent of a human to analyse, check and refine it. Eighty per cent of the grunt work underneath is increasingly handled by AI. Smaller team, bigger investment in the tools, faster turnaround, and often more accurate on the data side. But it still needs a human who really knows their stuff sitting across the top.
There is a lesson in that for anyone nervous about their role. The black and white, do as you are told, data in and data out work is the work at risk, because those exact processes are the ones an AI can be told to run more efficiently. The people who ask great questions, who stay curious, who bring experience and judgement, are the ones who thrive. As Mel says of the agency model, the research layer that does not carry experience is exactly what may disappear, in the same way a great lawyer is not replaced, but the junior research grind might be.
Why this episode is worth a listen
Mel and Mon talk through how AI is consolidating multiple marketing roles into one more capable person, why the human who interprets a client’s real needs is becoming more valuable rather than less, and the very honest moment where Mel spent two hours fighting a tool late at night before giving up and going back to basics. There is also a frank take on why “real marketing” is about to make a comeback. It is a clear eyed, optimistic look at a topic most people only discuss with dread.
Approach this with a glass half full, look at what you can uniquely contribute, and the future of marketing looks bright rather than frightening. AI is not coming to replace the marketers who understand the customer journey and the intent behind a search. It is coming for the marketing that never understood those things in the first place. Get curious, stay sharp, and you raise the bar. Bring it on.