“Do you use AI?” That’s the question I hear over and over again, but if you say “No,” you are somehow not with it. You’re not one of the cool kids. You obviously don’t know what’s happening. You’re inefficient and outdated.

The reality is, I use AI every day. So the answer is, “Yes, I use AI.”

AI has made competitive market analysis and market sizing easier than ever. What used to take most of a day now takes minutes, and the results are better than my old approach.

However, there are gaps in the answer. Huge canyons of missing information because media companies are stupid and AI is blind when the data is missing.

Media companies keep all their data private. AI has no idea of how many billboards, radio ads, or TV ads anybody is running. AI has no concept of mass media advertising because the data is held captive. Data aggregators buy it and sell it back to media companies so they can see who’s buying advertising. All the media companies would need to do is publish how many ads they ran, for whom, in any given month, and the data aggregator would instantly become redundant because of AI.

Therefore, any recommendation AI is going to make today about advertising your business is going to be digital advertising, because it’s the only thing it can see today. It is impossible for AI to recommend that you use mass media, because it can’t see the opportunities that exist there.

Once you’ve hit the limit of what digital advertising can deliver, you need to add a proactive marketing approach leveraging mass media. This is where our talented media buyers come in; they engineer the solution, which makes them an essential part of our teams because they can see what AI can’t.

The key with AI today is figuring out what it does well and how that can help you. Last week I had AI write code for a new business analysis tool, so I didn’t have to. That was lovely; now I get the analysis done by filling in three boxes and hitting enter instead of entering six to eight prompts.

Just remember, it’s blind to big chunks of information today. Therefore, AI isn’t all-seeing or all-knowing.

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