The Best Marketers Are Playing a Completely Different Game With AI
Marketing teams now have the ability to produce more content than ever before. The leaders winning are not the ones running the most campaigns. They are the ones who stepped back, asked a different question, and made a deliberate choice to play differently.
Chris Koehler, CMO of Twilio and a 25-year veteran at Adobe, Box, and other recognized technology brands, sees the shift clearly. His view on where AI is taking the profession centers on possibility, grounded in what he has already witnessed on the other side of this transition.
Content Abundance Changes Everything
"Content has always been the bottleneck," Koehler said. "We're getting into a world where content is the abundance. And who is going to be brave enough to actually pull back on how much content they create and differentiate themselves by saying less than more?"
In a profession that has always rewarded more output and more coverage, this is counterintuitive. Curated human work - the special, unique piece - becomes more valuable than the volume of AI-generated content a team can push out.
Koehler believes this is exactly where the next generation of great marketing will come from.
Using AI Is Not the Same as Being AI-First
Most marketing leaders blur a critical distinction. Using AI and being AI-first are fundamentally different, and the difference changes how a team approaches transformation.
"When we all got access to these incredibly powerful tools, the first approach was how do I look at this from my own personal productivity," Koehler said. "Then the next was, okay, maybe my team can be slightly more productive. And that's largely where we are today, basically optimizing the way that we've always done the work. We're just doing it faster, better, smarter."
That is valuable. It is not transformation.
True AI-first work is bolder: taking the entire marketing process and re-engineering it from the ground up rather than accelerating what already exists. "The ones that are AI-first are the ones taking the full process that they have today, re-engineering that and starting from scratch versus just optimizing the things that they've always done," Koehler said.
Learn more about how to apply these principles in your role with our AI Learning Path for CMOs and explore broader strategies in our AI for Marketing resource center.
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