What AI Can Do for You (Once You Get Past the Fear)

By Chloé Cardwell

AI has managed to become one of those topics people have very normal and measured opinions about — is my sarcasm subtle?

Depending on who you ask, AI is either going to revolutionize everything we know about work, creativity, and business, or it’s an evil robot coming for your job, and probably your firstborn.

Meanwhile, somewhere between those two extremes, the rest of us are trying to figure out how to use it without turning our brains off.

This new paradigm comes with plenty of flaws, but offers significant potential. ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini can get things wrong, create painfully generic content, and raise valid concerns around accuracy, privacy, and creativity. However — hear me out — they can also analyze information at incredible speed, uncover insights, streamline workflows, strengthen research, and create opportunities that would have required significantly more time and resources just a few years ago. The technology isn’t perfect, and using it well still requires careful human judgment and expertise.

So, with all of these potential benefits, why is the conversation around AI still heavily focused on rejection and fear? While that narrative continues, other brands are maximizing and scaling businesses with it. Which makes me wonder — when Google was introduced, was it feared similarly? Was the first computer a beacon of panic and techno doomsday? Is this fear a right of passage for advanced technologies… Or should we get our tin foil caps on and prepare for the war of the bots?

The Opportunity We’re Missing

I get it. Change is scary and unexplored territory presents a learning curve. But it’s also true that if you don’t ride the wave, you’ll be left wading in the water while brands learning to surf (see what I did there?) are the ones advancing. AI for business can bring about more than job replacement. Try and see the complex ways new platforms can be used: 

• Identifying recurring themes in customer feedback

• Organizing months of content performance

• Brainstorming questions your audience may be searching for

• Finding gaps worth exploring in your strategy

• Comparing how competitors position themselves

• Readily appearing in AI search (which is becoming increasingly integrated into traditional search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc)

Asking AI to do your job is one of the fastest ways to get mediocre results. The true value comes from putting such a powerful tool in the hands of someone who knows what to do with it. Key word being someone. 

Think about how many tools marketers already use to make our jobs easier. Scheduling platforms didn’t eliminate social media managers. Canva didn’t render graphic designers obsolete. Google didn’t diminish the need for researchers. We adopted tools that made certain parts of our jobs faster or more effective. So if it's a tool that can advance what you’re already working on, why not be one of the professionals driving growth this year?

Where AI Goes Sideways

Now don’t get me wrong — I’ve had my fair share of late night arguments with my computer. This is no AI glory blog post, and as useful as it is, there's a lot of work to be done.

How many times have you repeated the same command, given it so much information you nearly did all the work yourself, or sent the simplest request and received something back a third grader who doesn’t speak your language could have created? Yeah, same. Claude will do you dirty like a co-worker coming for your job in a blink of an eye. If you’re copy-and-pasting without editing, publishing information without verifying it, feeding sensitive company information into tools without understanding their privacy policies, or allowing ChatGPT to make strategic decisions you don’t understand yourself, you’re not maximizing it, you’re misusing it.

Working with AI can be like partner roulette on the group project — sometimes it’ll carry the load and sometimes it has no idea what's going on despite being told 10 times. And more than that, it doesn’t inherently understand your brand, your customers, your history, or the thousand little nuances an experienced marketing professional picks up on over years of doing the work. It can analyze information and confidently suggest a direction without all the necessary information or lived experience to properly interpret what it’s evaluating. That’s why humans have to stay at the core.

Use AI to research 20 competitors faster than you could manually, then use your mind to decide what matters. Use the technology to identify patterns in your analytics that the human eye might miss or take hours to catch. Employ your understanding of your audience to interpret why those patterns exist. Let AI help you generate 30 ideas, then decide which three are worth pursuing based on A/B testing and audience knowledge.

AI can make the process faster, but you shouldn’t rely on it exclusively. 

Fear  the future — or catch up in the present!

AI is changing quickly, and some of the concerns surrounding LLMs are completely warranted. We should question all new tech. We should fact-check it. We should establish boundaries around how we use it, and we absolutely should not assume that faster automatically means better.

AI isn’t going anywhere, and human expertise isn’t either. The brands getting the most out of these tools are learning where new processes make their teams faster, smarter, and more effective, while keeping actual humans behind the strategy, creativity, and decision-making.

And if you’re still standing on the hill waiting for some Terminator-esque uprising — hang tight! There's lots to learn about AI, and lots to be developed and improved upon, too. 

In the meantime, we can help you figure out which parts of AI are worth paying attention to, where it can make a measurable difference in your marketing, and how to use it without losing the human perspective that makes your brand uniquely yours. The robots may or may not be coming, but your competitors definitely are. Let’s make sure you’re ready.

Chloé is a WideFocus Community Manager who loves building brands from the ground up and helping companies show up online by blending strategy, empathy, and structure to turn content into real conversations.