AI Is Replacing Marketing Teams: How to Survive

AI is quietly replacing marketing teams, and most people don't know it, but by the time you do, it might be too late. Here's the reality. There are companies out there— I have a friend's company, they have thousands of employees, and they have an AI committee. And on this AI committee, they are tasked with finding efficiencies in their company. So far, they found more efficiencies using AI, but they've also cut 400 people. The scary part about this is that they bonus their AI committee on the people that they eliminate, and that's a very scary future. And so I'm here to show you how you can avoid it. I'm also here to show you what things are happening with AI right now, and I'm here to protect you from this future so that your company or your job is good to go. So here I'm going to show you how AI is clearly outperforming humans and give you a sense for where this world is going. The first thing that I'm going to show you is Manus AI. On my screen over here, you can see that Manus does an incredible job of finding me high-intent keywords that I want to be ranking for from an SEO standpoint, and If you don't understand SEO, that's okay. It's just this is work that is required for my team, and I'm going to tell you what my team said about this afterwards too, so you can get an understanding of what this looks like within an actual company. So here you can see 50 transactional yet subtle keywords for LinkedIn ABM ads, which is— that's one of the software products that I have. And you can see here, these are some of the keywords. So enterprise LinkedIn ABM implementation solutions guide, how to select LinkedIn ABM platform for enterprise needs. These are all high-intent keywords where people are searching for these keywords and they're likely to convert, which means they're likely to convert into sales, which is what we're trying to do with marketing at the end of the day. We're trying bring people to the point of sale, and then we're trying to get them to convert. That's marketing 101. Now, this would typically take people days, if not weeks, to get this done. And sometimes you have to ask people, sometimes people might say they're too busy or whatever it is exactly. This, I got the answer out in minutes, and it was very quick and understood what I was trying to do. So this is the future of agents, where you just one-shot prompt it and it gives you what you're looking for. This part is great, okay? So it does keyword research better and I think faster than human beings. And I asked it to create a blog post. Now, this blog post, by the way, when I prompted it, this is one of the key takeaways takeaways for you as well. You have to learn how to ask better questions. The clearer you are with your prompts, the better results that you're going to get. And so the prompt that I gave for this one is I said, hey, help me create a blog post based on the singlegrain.com/blog/writers-guidelines, whatever you interpret that to be. So I was very specific on where the blog section was on my website, and I wanted it to scan other blogs to figure out what are the key patterns that it sees with our blog post, and then it can figure out what our guidelines are based on those patterns. And so here, if I'm just scrolling down, you can see I've clearly asked for links, I've asked for stats, I've asked for tables. It's even showing case studies in here too. And obviously you're gonna have a human in the loop to review this to make sure everything looks okay. But if you can produce these at scale where these are actually good blog posts— and I'm not talking about blog posts from a couple years ago that AI could do— this is far better than what this has looked like in the past. And so in the past when AI would produce content, it would just be subpar. This is actually a lot closer to what we need it to be. And imagine if you can produce 50 or 100 of these at a time and it can send it to your CMS, which it actually can. You can then have a human in the loop just quickly spot check it and make sure everything's okay. Let's fact check things, let's add in links, let's add in statistics, or let's spot the statistics and then we're good to go. And so in this case, we are now able to not only move a lot faster, but when I talk to my team about this, they're like, whoa, we're going to be able to probably reclaim 15 to 20 hours a month and we'll probably be able to use that time for higher leverage activities. But we're also going to be able to decrease our costs down quite a bit. When I earlier I talked about the AI committee, the AI efficiency teams that these businesses are putting together, that is a very real thing. And I'll give you another story. I was at a founders retreat and I actually gave that story to everyone and almost everyone in that group, they said, whoa, I think we need one of those AI committees. And so if you want to defend yourself against that, or if you want more efficiencies for your company, I think every entrepreneur wants more efficiencies. But if you're watching this from the position of an employee, then what you have to do is you have to start figuring out how to learn this stuff. I'm going to show you how you can learn this stuff in a little bit. But right now I'm just showing you how these are real-life examples of this working. And I'm going to give you one more example if you're from a business standpoint. So you can see here, I asked it to create an ongoing dashboard for agency financial planning, and I gave it some dummy data. And you can see it's actually coding it right here. It's showing its work. And again, this is Manus, and Manus You can use other agents that will probably be out there by the time you watch this, but you can see it's creating dashboards and things like that, but it's showing its worth. And so this is both exciting and scary, but if you're constantly learning, if you're constantly adapting, this will be a lot more exciting than scary for you. And then you should feel like you are good to go for the future. LinkedIn ads are great, but let me give you the bad news first. The bad news is that you can't personalize the ads and you can't scale out the ads as quickly. The good news is if you're in a B2B space, you're doing account-based marketing, we have a solution for you called Karrot. That's K-A-R-R-O-T. And the good news is that you can create a lot of these campaigns with the click of a button. You can personalize the ads and there's a whole host of new things that are coming. If you want to get on the waitlist, just go to carrot.ai. Again, it's carrot.ai and we'll see you on the other side. So the reality within companies right now, it's interesting because on my agency side for Single Grain, we have our client services leader who's asking for more hires. And after I showed these workflows, I showed Manus in action with its agent and I showed it to the SEO team. I said, hey, do we need to hire more right now? They're like, I don't know if we need to hire more right now looking at this. I want to test this for the next month or so. And this type of Interaction is going to repeat over and over if the companies are embracing AI. And so, if you run a company right now, when you're hiring people, you have no choice but to ask what is the most impressive thing that you're doing with AI right now. And if they give you a subpar answer such as oh, I love ChatGPT. Oh, I use it all the time. Okay. Well, how are you using it? How are you using it in a business context? How have you used it to get results? And if they can't give you good examples, if they can't give you good examples of how they're experimenting with it, I don't think you can afford to hire these people for the most part. If it's job that is revenue-facing or a critical type of job, even a finance type of job, it is going to require work around AI. And I'll give you an example here, because for my company Single Grain, I've talked to finance people on the team before. This is a couple years ago. I said, hey, if you don't figure this stuff out, this is gonna be bad. You have to figure this stuff out, otherwise your job could be in jeopardy. What ended up happening was the work that we were doing, it would take me days if not weeks to get reports, and by that time I'm already on to something else. Speed really matters quite a bit in an AI-driven world, especially in an AI-driven world. And so if I wasn't getting the reports as quickly, what ended up happening was I ended up pulling Claude. I put in all our financials in there. I just started asking questions and I said, hey, you are CFO and this is the type of agency I have. I want you to find insights with my company. What are efficiencies we can find? What else is going on right now? What else should we be looking into? And I want you to ask me clarifying questions if you feel that you need more clarity before giving me an answer. By the way, that's another example of a prompt. Always ask for clarifying questions where you can because then it'll give you a better answer. Because you give it better inputs, it's going to give you better outputs ultimately. I have people messaging me from companies that are doing hundreds of millions a year. They're saying, hey Eric, do you know who can train our marketing team on AI? They're willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars if not To have that happen because they realize that they're falling behind. This is what's happening right now. This is slowly happening. It's quietly happening. But whenever I talk to entrepreneurs, everyone's looking for efficiencies. And that's not to say they're out to cut people. It's just to say that ultimately business is a mathematical equation and you're always looking to figure out where you can save on costs. Ultimately, unfortunately, a big piece of the cost comes down to humans, right? But if I flip to the other side, if you're a human listening to this right now and you're working somewhere, even if you're an entrepreneur, you don't want to be replaced. For me personally, I go to X. And I follow people such as Rowan Chung. He's a good example. There's a lot of people that are tweeting about AI consistently. So Andrej Karpathy, he was one of the founding members of OpenAI. The Darkest Patel podcast, that one's really good, or Darkest I should say, that's really good. BG Squared is also another great podcast too. Y Combinator, they have one called Light Cone. Sometimes they, they talk about AI there. I think Aaron Levy, the CEO of Box, he's doing a lot of interesting things with AI. You want to be listening to these people, but you also want to experimenting as well. So whether you're going to pull up an AI agent product like Amatis, or you want to pull up Claude, you want to pull up ChatGPT— I personally find myself using Grok quite a bit more for the deep thinking or the deep research and the thinking aspects. And when I pull up something like Amatis, I can create a financial dashboard that would take months for my finance team to do. Or if I want an example, if I want an ongoing dashboard for my entire company, I probably have to pay a SaaS company for that. But now I can have it create the prototype for it and I can have Manus code it up, and then I can finish it off using a product like Cursor, for example. There are a bunch of other apps you can use that are AI code editors, like Lovable, or you can use— Windsurf would be another one. You can use Replit. I love using Replit. I'm using it to make a Mario game right now, and when I'm at the gym, it's still helping me code, and I was doing that this morning. So you have to be really into this stuff, and you have to understand that playing the game of business is a competition, and those that are ahead with AI right now, they are compounding themselves quite a bit. And I think if you're doing the things that I'm telling you right now where you're constantly experimenting, you're not even going to be in the top 1%. You're going to be in the top 0.1%. And that advantage is massive. That could be the difference between life or death. And that could be the difference between no profits or millions and millions, tens of millions in profits. And that's what I want you to be able to have. I'm excited about this. If you find yourself having anxiety with this right now, you want to make sure that you're getting yourself into a position where you're optimistic because all the things that you're learning are making you more and more optimistic about All right, so I wanted to take a second to tell you about my ad agency, Single Grain. We're a performance digital marketing agency, and we focus primarily on working with B2B companies and e-commerce. So performance marketing, that's SEO, that's paid media, that's CRO, that's ad creative. And there are a whole host of other things that we're doing with AI that's really cool. You can go to singlegrain.com to learn more. Again, that's singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. So here's where I think marketers specifically are getting AI wrong. I'll use my company as an example. The ones that are not necessarily trying any new things, they're not necessarily learning learning, which is what I mentioned earlier. Those are the ones that you can see are falling behind. They're giving very sheepish answers like, hey, what have you learned with AI recently? What are you excited about? They just list whatever that has been mentioned in our AI working group chat. So I would say make sure that your company has an AI working group chat or some type of place where you can share AI learnings. But when they're just, just saying, oh, I like this, and when I ask, what do you like about this AI product because I'm the one that surfaced it, and they can't give an answer, that's when you know someone is falling behind. But when someone will DM me from my company and say, hey, I'm really interested in this, can you give me access to this, how can I explore this, you can tell they're interested. And then they'll come back a week later and say, hey, I've tested this, these results that I'm getting. Most marketers get it wrong where they think it's nothing new. They think this is a mere tool. But I look at AI as a thinking partner, and that's how you want to change how you perceive AI. It's a thinking partner. It's a thought partner that's going to get you ahead. And so oftentimes when I'm thinking about a strategy, or for example, yesterday we found out that there was a replica copycat of our product Carrot. And so for me, I'm trying to figure out, okay, what's the strategy next? Okay, we need to shore up our positioning. We need to think about what advantages we have that they don't have. So I use Grok, and it quickly became my thought partner there. And you want to think about how you can leverage AI to be your thought partner too. When you use Tools like Manus, for example, where it's an AI agent and you can have it all your financials in there. You can send all the core spreadsheets that you have within your company. You can use it as an actual strategic thought partner and take it ahead. And I also use it as my YouTube partner too. Someone responded, a YouTube consultant mentioned something on X, and they said, hey, leave your YouTube link and I will critique it. And so I left my link and he critiqued my channel. And so I took his feedback. He said, we have too many formats. And one second I'm talking about longevity, then I'm talking about AI, then I'm talking about SEO. And so I basically took screenshots of all recent videos with the stats, and I took his feedback and I dropped into the Grok and I asked for feedback around that. And it said, you know what you should be doing? You should be doing X, Y, and Z. And so that's how it's becoming my thought partner. And even with this video alone, after I strategized with it, that led to this video over here, which is why I'm making this video. AI was also my thought partner from a packaging standpoint, from a thumbnail, from a headline standpoint, 3 alternatives, the hooks, the open loops, all those things. And so now, by the way, I'll just call this out too. When I think about the internal brand team that we have that's tied to my YouTube channel, I haven't necessarily been getting the ideas. I haven't been getting new ideas. I haven't been getting packaging. And we still continue to make the same mistakes. And so I'm looking at figuring out how else we can improve, how else we can become more efficient. This is also a shout out to my team over here. Those that want to step up will step up. Those that don't will continue to unfortunately make the same mistakes. And if I have to keep finding other things and I have to keep spotting things and I find myself starting to do other people's jobs, unfortunately that means we're going to have to make changes on the team. And so you can see how I'm actively thinking about this already. But I just think to have a genius in your pocket, multiple geniuses, people can actually prompt these AIs and it'll basically one-shot apps for you. Sometimes it will one-shot outputs for you, whereas with other LLMs it would take you 20, 30+ shots. That's the world that we're going into where it's going to become a lot more done for you. Right now it's a lot of done with you. It's going to get to done for you. So to close it out, if you want to get ahead of other people, whether you're a marketer or the entrepreneur, all you have to do is embrace AI as your thought partner and not look at it as another simple tool and not look at it as something that's a threat to your job. If you don't use it, if you don't enhance yourself with AI, using it as a thought partner, using it as a thought strategist, you're going to be in trouble. Because think about it this way, you alone versus you with a genius, who is going to crush it? The second one, 10,000 times more. All right, so with that being said, if you enjoyed this video, I want you to check out the next video on how I'm adding millions to my company using AI.