What That AI Tool is Really Offering
The pitch seems to be everywhere.
An AI platform that writes your blogs. Your social. Automatically. For a fraction of what a team of people costs.
The savings are the headline. The math looks great on their website.
I get the appeal. If you run a staffing firm, marketing is the line item that’s hardest to measure and easiest to second-guess. So when a marketing agency shows up promising the same output for a fraction of the price, of course, you lean in. Who wouldn’t?
But here’s the part that their demo skips.
What you should be paying for is never just the content. It’s the strategy, knowledge, and experience behind it. It’s a marketing expert guiding what is worth saying this quarter, in your market, to your buyers.
Writing is always the easy part. The hard part is knowing which idea earns a prospect’s attention, and which one is just more words.
Think about the last piece of marketing that actually got results for you. It wasn’t the sheer volume. It wasn’t the cadence. It was that one message that landed on the right desk and said something true and something that your competitors weren’t saying. That came from someone (a human) who understood your business and the market well enough to know exactly what mattered.
That’s the part that is worth investing in, and it’s the part that doesn’t come out of an AI content engine.
When you automate the output, you don’t keep the strategy and just shed the cost. No, you just end up with more posts, more blogs, more perfectly-formatted (and perfectly forgettable) content.
This is the trap. A tool optimizes for what it can measure, like words produced, posts scheduled, and boxes checked. It can’t optimize for what it can’t see or know, and that is whether any of it made a prospective buyer trust you a little more than they did last week. That part requires a person who knows the difference.
Now let me be clear about where I stand, because it would be easy to read this message as anti-technology. It isn’t. We use AI regularly. It’s a sharp tool, and we’d be foolish not to leverage it.
But it’s the chisel, not the sculptor.
AI can lower the cost of producing a lot of content. But it can’t lower the cost of producing content that’s worth reading.
So before you buy the savings, ask what is actually being subtracted. If the answer is wasted effort, then wonderful. But, if the answer is the strategy that made your marketing worth doing in the first place, that’s not savings. That’s cutting out the one thing that was working.