That Exhausting AI Feeling

The AI debate is exhausting and pointless…

It takes massive data center clusters to power AI, but the human brain is THE astonishing piece of hardware. It runs on about 20 watts, crashes occasionally due to lack of sleep or caffeine, and yet can invent culture, fall in love with fonts, and instantly sense when an ad is trying too hard. 

No machine—no matter how many GPUs it eats for breakfast—comes close to matching its blend of logic, intuition, memory, emotion, and bad decisions that somehow lead to great ideas. 

This is why the breathless panic about AI “replacing” marketers is missing the point. 

AI isn’t a rival superintelligence; it’s the most powerful assistive technology creativity has ever had. It can process more information in seconds than a human could in a lifetime. It can summarize, simulate, optimize, and generate at industrial speed. It’s extraordinary. And also, famously, incapable of wanting anything.

AI doesn’t know why a line is funny, why a brand moment feels off, or why a single image can make someone feel seen. It doesn’t feel cultural tension. 

It doesn’t sense timing. It doesn’t wake up at 3 a.m. with an idea that refuses to let go. It predicts patterns; humans break them.

For marketers and agencies, for sure AI is now unavoidable, perhaps indispensable. It’s also insufficient. 

Used well, it clears the brush, accelerating research, exploring territories, stress-testing ideas, and freeing people from the soul-crushing parts of the job. Used poorly, it just makes average thinking faster and more scalable.

My bottom line: There is no competitive advantage in AI adoption without human amplification because the magic happens when the incredible agency professionals whom I meet daily - curious, empathetic, and creatively opinionated use machines to extend—not replace—their thinking. 

The future doesn’t belong to AI alone, or to humans pretending it doesn’t matter. It belongs to people who know the most powerful technology in the room is still the one doing the asking, not just the answering.

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