This newsletter is based on a podcast interview with Dave Coughlin on Over A Pint. Dave leads marketing at Sentry Equipment.
We covered a lot of ground, here's one thing that jumped out.
Dave thinks AI is becoming a crutch for marketers.
And he's got a point.
We have this incredibly powerful tool that can help us research, write, analyze, and create faster than ever before.
But I wonder if some marketers are becoming so dependent on AI to do the work that they're forgetting how to do the thinking.
Are we using AI to become better marketers? Or simply faster ones?
Welcome to the Content Factory
Think about what a marketing department can produce today compared to three years ago.
Blog posts. Social media content. Email campaigns. Video scripts. Ad copy. Presentations. Graphics. The list goes on.
Give someone with a little AI experience a decent prompt, and they can generate enough material to keep a marketing calendar humming for weeks.
Pretty impressive. But here's where things get interesting.
Let's say your marketing team previously produced five pieces of content a week. Now, with AI, they're producing 25.
Five times the output. But are you getting five times the results?
More qualified leads? Better engagement? Higher conversion rates? Stronger customer relationships? Or are you just filling more squares on the content calendar?
During our conversation, Dave brought up something legendary basketball coach John Wooden once said: "Don't confuse activity with achievement."
I can't think of a better piece of advice for marketers.
We've become exceptionally good at producing things. But producing something and accomplishing something aren't necessarily the same.
When AI Becomes a Crutch
Dave referenced an observation from Mark Cuban about the difference between being book smart and street smart.
The basic idea is that AI has access to an extraordinary amount of information. But information and judgment are two different things.
And I think this gets to the heart of Dave's concern about AI becoming a crutch.
There's a big difference between using AI to help develop an idea and asking AI to come up with the idea because you haven't bothered to do the thinking yourself.
One approach uses technology to make you better at your job. The other lets you avoid doing part of your job.
Think about how this plays out in marketing.
Say you're a manufacturer trying to develop a campaign around the reliability of your products. You ask AI to develop five campaign concepts. It gives you five perfectly reasonable ideas about quality, engineering, precision, and dependability.
Nothing wrong with them. Except there's a problem.
What if reliability isn't the most important thing to your customers? What if they're more concerned about downtime, service, or the cost of replacing equipment?
Did anyone talk to the customers? Did anyone challenge the original assumption? Or did we just accept five perfectly reasonable ideas because AI gave them to us in 30 seconds?
That's where the crutch comes in.
AI can generate answers all day long. But marketers still need to know which questions are worth asking.
And there's another potential problem.
Your three biggest competitors can ask essentially the same question and get essentially the same answers.
Congratulations. You've all produced competent marketing that looks and sounds remarkably similar.
A 2024 study published in Science Advances examined how generative AI affected creative writing.
Researchers found that people using AI produced stories evaluated as more creative and enjoyable, particularly those who were less creative to begin with.
That's the good news.
The bad news? The AI-assisted stories were also more similar to one another.
The researchers identified a fascinating trade-off: AI can improve an individual's creative performance while reducing the diversity of ideas across a larger group.
Now, writing fictional stories isn't the same thing as developing a marketing campaign. But the implications should get our attention.
AI can help us generate ideas. But if we stop challenging those ideas, questioning assumptions, and bringing our own experience to the process, we're not necessarily becoming better marketers.
We're just becoming better at using AI. And those aren't the same thing.
AI Can Make Us More Creative, Too
AI can absolutely make people more creative. In fact, some of the research makes that pretty clear.
A 2026 study published in Organization Science looked at 791 professionals at Procter & Gamble working on actual product innovation challenges. Researchers found that individuals using AI could match the performance of teams working without it.
Think about that.
One person equipped with AI could, in certain circumstances, produce work comparable to a traditional team.
That's a pretty significant development.
The research also found that AI improved the quality of generated ideas, while human judgment remained valuable when evaluating and selecting them.
And that's where I think the real opportunity sits.
AI can help us explore possibilities, challenge assumptions, analyze information, and develop ideas we might never have considered. But somebody still needs to determine which ideas are worth pursuing.
Somebody needs to understand the customer, recognize the business problem, and decide what success looks like.
Better tools don't eliminate the need for better thinking.
They create an opportunity for more of it.
You've Just Moved the Bottleneck
During the podcast, we also discussed this idea of moving the problem down the line. In the past, it took time to create a deliverable, e.g. a sales deck, a new campaign look, etc.
With AI that problem is no longer the speed bump it once was. Today a team can produce 60 pieces of content in the time it previously took to produce one.
Sounds fantastic until someone has to review those 60 pieces.
Is the messaging accurate? Is the content on brand? Are the facts correct? Does it meet legal requirements? Will it actually resonate with customers?
Suddenly, your productivity miracle has created a pretty impressive traffic jam in the approval department.
You've accelerated production without necessarily improving the process.
There's research that helps explain this.
A 2025 National Bureau of Economic Research study examined how AI affected 7,137 knowledge workers across 66 companies.
Among employees who used the technology, researchers found meaningful time savings, including roughly two fewer hours spent on email each week during the latter half of the experiment.
But they didn't detect broader changes in the quantity or composition of employees' tasks from providing the AI tools individually.
In other words, people became more efficient at certain activities. But the organization didn't automatically change how it worked.
If marketing teams want to capture the full value of AI, they may need to rethink their workflows, responsibilities, decision-making processes, and approval structures.
Start With the Goal, Not the Prompt
Here's another thing came up in the interview.
When someone on Dave’s team brings him AI-generated work, he starts by asking a simple question:
"What's the goal?"
Then he wants to understand how the person used AI to get there.
As Dave put it, it's incredibly easy to become fascinated with what a tool can produce and lose sight of why you're producing it in the first place.
Are we trying to build awareness in a new market? Influence a buying committee? Generate qualified conversations? Strengthen customer retention?
Those are very different business objectives.
And they probably require different approaches.
AI can help execute the strategy. It can even help us evaluate potential strategies.
But marketers still need to identify the problem worth solving.
So before launching your next AI-powered content initiative, here are a few questions worth considering:
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What business outcome are we trying to influence?
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How will we know whether the work is successful?
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Are we using AI to improve the thinking or simply accelerate production?
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Where does human expertise add the most value?
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What will we do with the time AI gives back to us?
That last question is especially important.
If AI saves your marketing team 10 hours a week, what happens to those 10 hours?
Do you simply produce another 20 blog posts?
Or do you spend more time talking with customers, studying competitors, exploring new markets, and developing ideas that might actually move the business forward?
Listen to Episode 200 of Over a Pint here.
