To get high-quality, on-brand output from AI, teams must invest more time in the initial strategic phase. This means creating highly precise creative briefs with clear insights and target audience definitions. AI scales execution, but human strategy must guide it to avoid generic, off-brand results.

Using AI to generate content without adding human context simply transfers the intellectual effort to the recipient. This creates rework, confusion, and can damage professional relationships, explaining the low ROI seen in many AI initiatives.

Brands using AI to write RFPs are a red flag. These documents are easy to spot and lack the specific, human insight needed for a quality response. Briefs should come directly from senior decision-makers to clearly articulate the business's actual needs.

Since AI is now ubiquitous in marketing, the critical question is no longer *if* an agency uses it, but *how*. A strong partner can articulate how they integrate AI to improve operations while ensuring the final output is strategic, on-brand, authentic, and human-led.

Off-the-shelf AI models can only go so far. The true bottleneck for enterprise adoption is "digitizing judgment"—capturing the unique, context-specific expertise of employees within that company. A document's meaning can change entirely from one company to another, requiring internal labeling.

Despite AI's capabilities, it lacks the full context necessary for nuanced business decisions. The most valuable work happens when people with diverse perspectives convene to solve problems, leveraging a collective understanding that AI cannot access. Technology should augment this, not replace it.

Even a well-trained AI can produce emails that feel robotic. A rep's message, despite being structurally sound, was criticized because it "read like a chat GVT email." This highlights the risk of losing the human element and personal flair that builds connection, even with advanced tools.

As AI floods marketplaces with automated, synthetic communication, buyers experience fatigue. This creates a scarcity of authentic human interaction, making genuine connection and emotional intelligence a more valuable and powerful differentiator for sales professionals.

AI makes it easy to generate grammatically correct but generic outreach. This flood of 'mediocre' communication, rather than 'terrible' spam, makes it harder for genuine, well-researched messages to stand out. Success now requires a level of personalization that generic AI can't fake.