AI excels at tasks like account scoring and initial insight gathering, providing a massive head start. However, the final strategic layer—interpreting the data and crafting the value proposition—requires human expertise. This "human first, AI fast" approach maximizes efficiency without sacrificing quality.
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Avoid using AI to create sales outreach from scratch ('black pen'). Instead, use it as an editor ('red pen'). Apply the 10-80-10 rule: 10% human-led prompting, 80% AI-driven task execution, and a final 10% human refinement. This maintains quality while boosting efficiency.
Implement AI effectively by allocating 10% of your time to human-led strategy (ideation), delegating 80% to AI for repetitive execution (research, list building), and reserving the final 10% for human review and integration. This framework ensures human taste and vision remain central to the process.
Beyond just generating creative, the future of AI in CRM is using "agentic AI" to build better strategies. This involves agents that help define audience segments, determine the next best product or action, and accelerate the implementation of complex campaigns, enhancing human strategy rather than replacing it.
When vetting an agency, ask how they integrate AI. The best answer isn't that they avoid it or use it to simply cut costs. Look for partners who use AI as a tool to augment human analysis, conduct deeper research, and ultimately make more informed strategic decisions.
Go beyond using AI for data synthesis. Leverage it as a critical partner to stress-test your strategic opinions and assumptions. AI can challenge your thinking, identify conflicts in your data, and help you refine your point of view, ultimately hardening your final plan.
AI can generate hundreds of statistically novel ideas in seconds, but they lack context and feasibility. The bottleneck isn't a lack of ideas, but a lack of *good* ideas. Humans excel at filtering this volume through the lens of experience and strategic value, steering raw output toward a genuinely useful solution.
Marketers mistakenly believe implementing AI means full automation. Instead, design "human-in-the-loop" workflows. Have an AI score a lead and draft an email, but then send that draft to a human for final approval via a Slack message with "approve/reject" buttons. This balances efficiency with critical human oversight.
A powerful framework for the human-AI partnership: AI provides the "intellectual capacity" (data, options, research), but the salesperson must serve as the "intellectual activator." Their irreplaceable role is applying strategic judgment and critical thinking to activate the information AI provides.
Adopt a 'more intelligent, more human' framework. For every process made more intelligent through AI automation, strategically reinvest the freed-up human capacity into higher-touch, more personalized customer activities. This creates a balanced system that enhances both efficiency and relationships.
AI should not be the starting point for creation, as that leads to generic, spam-like output. Instead, begin with a distinct human point of view and strategy. Then, leverage AI to scale that unique perspective, personalize it with data, and amplify its distribution.
