The AI Marketing Strategy Gap
How a profound shift in the marketing landscape brought me to sharing my strategic thinking publicly.
In my 15+ years of marketing leadership, I’ve witnessed three major inflexion points that fundamentally changed how marketing works.
The first was the shift from traditional to digital. The second was the rise of social media and content marketing. The third?
We’re living through it right now: the democratisation of AI in marketing.
And it’s this third shift that’s brought me back online with an authentic voice after years of staying relatively quiet on professional platforms.
Everything I Knew Was Getting Commoditised
Like you, I’ve been watching marketing professionals celebrate AI tools and prompts that could “write email sequences in minutes” and “generate social media content automatically.”
The excitement was palpable, but so was something else: a sense that the marketing expertise I’ve spent 15 years building was being reduced to prompt engineering.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against AI. I’ve been tracking AI developments and their implications for marketing since the emergence of GPT-3.
However, what struck me was that while everyone was discussing marketing tools, very few were discussing marketing strategy.
Through all my experience building teams, scaling startups from zero to success, and managing budgets from zero to millions, one principle remained constant: strategic thinking consistently outperforms tactical tools.
Yet the AI marketing conversation seemed almost entirely tactical.
Am I Getting Replaced?
Like many experienced marketers, I faced the uncomfortable question:
“Are we getting replaced?”
Throughout my marketing career, I’ve learned the fundamentals through hands-on execution. This included everything from debugging conversion tracking to building martech stacks from scratch, hiring first marketing teams, presenting defending marketing plans and proving ROIs to management.
As I progressed from intern to CMO, each role taught me something new about the strategic, tactical, and operational orchestration required to make marketing truly effective.
The journey from execution to strategy isn’t just about climbing a corporate ladder; it’s about understanding how every piece of the marketing puzzle connects to business outcomes.
When you’ve managed brand and marketing communications, digital campaigns, marketing operations and also presented marketing performance to management, you develop a perspective that’s hard to replicate with prompts and AI tools alone.
But that perspective only matters if it’s relevant to the future we’re building.
The Strategic Gap I Discovered
After stepping back as CMO to spend more time with my young family, I couldn’t help but continue to think about the future of marketing in the age of AI.
What I discovered was a “pile of parts” problem.
Brilliant tools, sophisticated prompts, impressive automation capabilities, but often disconnected from strategic frameworks that could orchestrate them toward measurable business outcomes.
It reminded me of having world-class car parts without an engine block to connect them into a functioning vehicle.
The challenge I faced, and I suspect many marketing leaders face, is how to leverage decades of hard-won knowledge in an era where AI can execute many of the tasks that once defined our expertise.
Having gone through multiple inflexion points in marketing and built teams across global markets, I’ve come to believe that the foundational principles of marketing success remain remarkably consistent. What changes are the methodologies, the tools, and how we apply them.
The operational, tactical, and strategic thinking that got me from intern to CMO isn’t obsolete in the age of AI. I think it’s more valuable than ever.
However, it needs to be applied systematically to new challenges.
Why I’m Back: The Strategy Imperative
I’m showing up because I believe we need more strategic thinking in the AI marketing conversation, not more tool reviews, prompt hacks and n8n workflow download logs.
I’m not an AI guru with the latest prompt library. I’m not here to sell you a course or promote an AI-generated or powered SaaS platform.
I’m here to share my thoughts on how to bridge strategic thinking with tactical AI execution, leveraging over 15 years of hands-on marketing experience, including managing campaigns, building teams, and contributing to successful exits.
I’ll explore and architect frameworks for how AI in marketing could work, then implement the day-to-day tools, prompts, workflows, and campaigns that drive measurable results.
This isn’t about being replaced by AI, it’s about being augmented by it.
The marketers who will thrive in the AI age aren’t those who collect the most tools or master the most prompts.
They’re the ones who can think systematically about marketing challenges and orchestrate AI capabilities toward strategic outcomes.
What You Can Expect
Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing my thought experiment on building an autonomous AI marketing framework that systematically orchestrates AI capabilities around strategic outcomes rather than tactical outputs.
My approach is built on intellectual honesty. I’ll document the process transparently. What’s working, where my assumptions get challenged, and where I’m wrong.
You’ll gain insights into AI marketing from the perspective of someone who has experienced every level of marketing, across the tactical, operational, and strategic aspects of marketing.
The Invitation
If you’re a marketing leader, founder or builder navigating the same questions:
- How to leverage AI in marketing without being replaced by it
- How to apply strategic thinking to AI marketing challenges
- How to future-proof your marketing expertise in the AI age
I’d love for you to join me on this journey of discovery.
Let’s explore how to apply the systematic strategic thinking that experienced marketers like you already possess to the new challenges and opportunities presented by AI.
AI won’t build the future of marketing alone. It’ll be built by strategic thinkers like you who know how to orchestrate AI capabilities toward meaningful business outcomes.
The conversation starts now.
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P.S. I’m currently available for marketing projects and consulting engagements. I welcome conversations with founders who need to take their products from zero to traction, as well as established companies navigating AI marketing transformation while maintaining day-to-day marketing execution.