In an age of deep learning, automated content, and generative AI tools that promise to “do it all,” it’s easy to see the appeal. Especially when you’re a busy business owner juggling multiple plates or you’re in a stretched marketing team with limited budget and resources.
AI writes blog posts, generates emails, creates visuals, drafts entire marketing plans and even suggests what you should do next with your business.
But just because it can – doesn’t mean you should trust it to.
At Big Reputation, we work with ambitious businesses who are serious about building a brand. That means we care about the reality of what goes on behind the scenes. And when it comes to trusting AI to create your marketing strategy? That’s where the cracks begin to show.
What Trust in Strategy Really Means
To trust something with your marketing strategy means handing over the keys to how your business operates. It means letting that ‘thing’ or person decide:
- Who your target audience is
- What you say about your products or services
- How your brand is positioned in the market
- Where your resources go – from email marketing to campaigns and events
- What kind of assets you should create
- How you allocate your assets held – from budget and tools to team capacity
- How you build a brand for the long term, not just short term results
It’s about judgement, timing, emotion, personality, psychology, and above all else – reputation.
AI Doesn’t Know Your Business
Artificial intelligence (AI) – or more specifically, artificial intelligence (AI) powered by large language models (LLM) – is trained on data, not your story. It has access to a wide view of the digital world, but none of the internal nuance that defines your business.
It doesn’t understand that your customer service team just earned a 4.9 rating on Trustpilot. It doesn’t know your founder’s background, your sales targets, or that your marketing needs to support recruitment as much as lead generation.
Even if you feed it detailed prompts about your products or services, it still won’t grasp the unspoken internal goals, shifting team dynamics, or emotional intelligence needed to respond to trends or market pressure in real time.
It matters because strategy is about vision. And sometimes you’re working off intuition, not a LLM that’s pre-loaded with data.
Strategy Requires Human Judgement
AI excels at logic. But marketing isn’t just logic. It’s emotion. It’s psychology. It’s nuance. It’s knowing when to speak, when to stay quiet, and when to make a bold move that nobody saw coming.
It’s understanding:
- That one word can change how someone feels about a product
- That trust is built slowly and destroyed in seconds
- That people buy into why you do what you do – not just what you sell
AI can’t read the room. It can’t judge whether your audience is fatigued, frustrated, inspired or disengaged. It can’t sense when the timing is off, or when your competitors are quietly shifting their approach behind the scenes.
In short: AI doesn’t know people. And people are who we market to.
Generic Inputs = Generic Outputs
We’ve seen it time and again. Businesses ask AI to “create a marketing strategy for a B2B tech company” or “write a content plan for manufacturers.” The result? A perfectly formatted, professional-sounding, completely uninspired document.
Why? Because generative AI doesn’t innovate – it synthesises. It pulls together what’s already been said, written, or published. It gives you the average of what already exists.
But when you build a brand on average inputs, you get average outcomes:
- Safe campaigns that blend in
- Recycled blog posts with no point of view
- Bland email marketing that doesn’t convert
- Marketing efforts that look busy but feel hollow
And none of that builds brand loyalty, trust, or distinction – because there’s no personality.
A marketing strategy should never be average. It should be specific, commercial, and totally aligned with your audience, tone of voice, and growth ambitions.
AI Can’t Replace Strategic Thinking
Great strategy is layered. It requires:
- An understanding of your commercial model
- Data-backed decisions grounded in proper market research
- Knowledge of the internal tools and assets held
- Real awareness of what your audience needs at every stage of the funnel
- Brand direction that feels human, fresh, and long-term focused
AI can help you create content, but it can’t define your north star.
Even if it pulls in impressive stats, it won’t know which KPIs matter most to your board. Even if it uses the right language, it won’t know which words your sales team are actually using to convert prospects. And even if it suggests channel tactics, it won’t know what makes your audience care.
So Where Can AI Be Useful?
We’re not against AI – we use it too. But we use it with full awareness of its limits.
Here’s where we see it adding value:
- Repurposing content: Turning blogs into bite-sized posts or newsletters
- Speeding up research: Summarising reports or trends from market research
- Specific tasks: Creating spreadsheets, running grammar checks, formatting documents
AI can enhance execution. But it shouldn’t be trusted to define direction. If your strategy is only based on tools, not thinking, you’ll always be reactive – never proactive.
A Word on Brand and Risk
Your brand is more than your colours and logo – it’s your voice, your positioning, your story. It’s the reason someone says “yes” to you over someone else. So if you’re handing that over to a tool trained on everyone else’s content – you’re diluting what makes you you.
This gets even riskier for regulated industries. We’ve seen AI tools confidently output advice about types of trusts, legal disclaimers, and policy structures – without citing sources or confirming accuracy.
Artificial intelligence AI may be powerful, but it can’t be held accountable when it gets it wrong.
If you work in industries where credibility, compliance or trust are non-negotiables – tread carefully. Misinformation, even unintentional, can cause real damage.
Think Twice Before You Input Anything Sensitive
It’s easy to assume that AI tools are just “helpers” – but most are built on large language models (LLMs), which work by being trained on huge volumes of text, code, images, and video. When you input data into an LLM-powered tool, you might be feeding its training set – meaning it could learn from what you’ve typed, uploaded, or created.
And no, this isn’t a conspiracy. It’s already happening.
Platforms like CapCut and WeTransfer have updated their terms to allow them to use user content to train their own AI models. That means your client decks, brand videos, product images or internal strategies could be scraped, absorbed and redistributed – often without a big flashy warning screen telling you what’s changed.
In most cases, if you’re using a free or low-cost tool, you are the product. The content you upload is being used to make the tool better – not just for you, but for every other user. That might be acceptable for generic content. But what about:
- Unreleased product messaging?
- Financial forecasts?
- Strategic IP or brand positioning?
- Early campaign concepts?
If you wouldn’t publish it on your website, don’t feed it into a chatbot or free tool without knowing exactly how it handles your data. Once it’s in – you may not be able to get it back.
It’s another reason why trusting AI with your full marketing strategy is a risky move. The tools aren’t neutral. They’re learning. And they’re learning from you.
Final Thought: Don’t Confuse Speed with Strategy
AI might save time – but time saved on the wrong strategy doesn’t help your business. And while it might help you publish faster or work through ideas at pace, that’s not the same as clarity, consistency or brand value.
The best marketing strategies are human-led. They’re anchored in insight, powered by creativity, and tested by results. They support growth across sales, partnerships, and recruitment. They don’t just produce content – they build brand and reputation.
So no, we don’t think you should trust AI to create your marketing strategy.
We think you should trust people who understand it, challenge it, and know when to not use it.
Need a strategy that’s built for your business – not borrowed from the internet?
Get in touch to build a plan you can trust.