In this conversational segment, Jimmy Kim challenges the common claim that AI copywriting saves marketers 80% of their time, arguing that the reality is far less efficient. Ben agrees, explaining that the promised 80% time reduction only materializes when users employ strong prompts and embed detailed brand context. Most marketers lack these, resulting in AI output that may only be 50‑60% usable. The remaining 40‑50% requires extensive editing, rewriting, and careful stitching to ensure the AI‑generated sections flow with human‑written content. This editing overhead can outweigh the time saved, making the 80% claim misleading for many users. Both speakers acknowledge that skilled users can achieve better results, but the gap between novice and expert usage is significant.
Chapters
AI copy needs way more editing than most marketers admit, and AI saves us 80% of the time claim is mostly wrong. I think it's interesting because the AI positive crowd doesn't want to hear that noise. What are your thoughts, Ben?
That's a funny one. It is so true. Everyone does say like, AI gets you to 80% and you take it to 100%. Sounds nice to say. I've probably said it before in the past, but the reality is, look, first AI gets you to 80%, and only if you have a great prompt and the brand context loaded. However, Most marketers do not. Their AI maybe only gets them halfway there, maybe 60% if we're being generous, not the 80 that is kind of the buzzwords that everyone talks about. The 55% of the AI copy that you actually have to fix, dude, oftentimes it takes way longer to edit and fix that than if you were to just do it yourself. So it's kind of interesting to think about, and you have to read it carefully. You have to identify the parts that are off, you have to rewrite them, and you have to make sure the rewrites flow with the AI parts that you kept. So it kind of becomes like this weird kind of funky like mix and matching kind of, you know, stitching type problem. Whereas like I think if wrote from scratch, it's just writing. You don't have to do the stitching. So I think the time savings that everyone makes it out to be in most cases is a lie. I personally love it and benefit greatly from it, but you and I are probably in a different bucket and probably some of the listeners are in a different bucket as well, where it's a lie if you're doing it badly. Like if you're doing it well, the gap between the bad and how well you can actually do it is pretty high.
