One trend I’ve been watching closely is the rapid shift from AI assisting marketing teams to AI increasingly running marketing workflows.

Amazon recently began trialling lower-cost Claude models to generate advertising content. It’s another signal that the adtech stack - creative, targeting and optimisation - is being rebuilt around autonomous agents rather than human specialists.

The economics are compelling. The marginal cost of producing advertising content is rapidly approaching zero.

At first glance, that sounds like a marketer’s dream.

But I keep wondering whether we’re focusing on the wrong constraint.

Content has never really been the scarce resource. Attention is.
If every organisation can generate thousands of campaign variations at almost no cost, we won’t create a more efficient advertising ecosystem. We’ll create an even noisier one.

That makes me think the competitive advantage shifts elsewhere.

The winners won’t be the organisations producing the most content. They’ll be the ones using AI to eliminate low-value execution while doubling down on the things that remain uniquely human - understanding customers, spotting cultural shifts, taking calculated creative risks and building trust over years rather than quarters.

There’s another question that deserves more attention.

If AI agents are optimising campaigns against immediate conversion metrics, who is protecting the long-term health of the brand? Brand equity has always been difficult to measure, which also makes it easy for an optimisation algorithm to undervalue.

The real challenge for executives isn’t deciding whether to deploy AI agents. That decision has largely been made.

It’s deciding where human judgement should remain firmly in the loop.

#AdTech #AI #Marketing #BrandStrategy #Leadership