Kathleen Booth says most marketers will adopt AI for scale and efficiency, while a small premium segment will reject it entirely, like boutique fashion. The real strategy: commit fully to whichever path you choose and treat it as an art form.
There's a class of people who say, I'm never going to use AI And I actually do think that there is a place for those people. But the way I would think of it is like, that is going to be more like a craft industry where it's like, for example, there's mass produced fashion, for example, and then there are like really boutique fashion brands where they're like, we're making jeans and we're hand dying them. And there's like, for people in our, you know, in our factory that are hand sewing the seams and you're going to pay like $1,500 for that pair of jeans. And there is a market for that. There are people who are like, I want something that no machine has touched, right? And the same goes for, you know, there's, with art, there are people who will only paint and use more traditional mediums as opposed to using digital forms. And like, there will always be a space for that level of craft. And I think that's true to, in marketing, in any other discipline. Like, there will be marketers who, who build their brand on like, hey, we use zero AI and they carve out a niche for that. And I think that's great. I just think that for, you know, like, in any industry, the craft piece of the industry is going to be a small percentage of it because there's only a small percentage of buyer that puts a premium on that approach. Whereas the, like, I don't know what 90, 95% of the rest are of companies for mostly like, economic reasons are going to need to use these tools to scale and it makes sense and it lets them reach a broader audience. So that's kind of how I think about it. Like, I would never say, hey, if you don't like AI, you're crazy or you're not going to succeed. I think if you don't like AI and you don't want to use it, lean really hard into that and make that your brand and become like one of those craft creators and make it all about that. But if you're going to do it, you got to be all in, right? And you got to. It becomes almost like an art form versus the rest of us who are not choosing to go that path. It becomes about how do we use it smartly and be super efficient.
