THE FUTURE OF AI

IN MARKETING
Top Strategic Insights from
Marketing Against the Grain
Executive
Summary
The marketing landscape is transforming rapidly with AI, but success isn’t about
replacement — it’s about amplification. In this exclusive guide, we’ve distilled 10 most
powerful insights about AI and marketing from conversations with industry leaders on
Marketing Against the Grain.

Expert panel

Kieran Flanagan & Kipp Bodnar Dharmesh Shah

MATG hosts Hubspot

Andrew Chen Ethan Smith Ethan DeWaal

a16z Graphite Asana

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 Part 1
The Human-AI
Collaboration Framework
AI Agents Will Revolutionize Marketing
AI agents aren’t just tools — they’re digital teammates that can understand complex goals,
leverage multiple AI models, and execute sophisticated workflows.

What’s an AI agent, in Dharmesh’s words

I think of an AI agent as a piece of software that uses AI to

accomplish a goal that requires multiple steps to get through.

You’re giving higher-order goals to an AI agent, goals that it may

need to invoke multiple LLMs or other tools to accomplish.

The impact is already measurable: HubSpot has

15-20%
rolled out AI tools across 100% of the product
productivity gain
team. Over the course of the last year, our
by integrating AI
estimate is we’re getting 15%- 20% of measurable
improvements to an engineer’s productivity.

But the real breakthrough comes from viewing

When you combine human creativity with AI
AI as a collaborative partner rather than a
capabilities, you unlock possibilities that were
replacement for humans.
inconceivable even a few years ago. We’re at the
beginning of something transformative, and the
early adopters will have an incredible advantage.

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 Part 2
Implementation
Strategies
7 practical ways you can level up your marketing game with AI

1 Systemize Content Creation with AI

Most people throw a two-sentence prompt at ChatGPT and expect magic. That’s not how you
create viral content. You need to build actual systems for AI to replicate great content.

Take Kieran’s approach: he developed an AI agent that transforms YouTube content into engaging
LinkedIn posts by breaking down content structure with surgical precision. He trains Claude like
a new team member, mapping out every element — here’s the opening scene, here’s where we
add internal monologue, here’s the turning point…

Then he gets Claude to analyze specific writing

styles from top creators, turning their unique
voices into detailed guidelines.

AI suggests, human refines. The AI-generated

first draft helps you save time (and avoid the
horror of an empty page), but the real magic
happens in the editing — that’s when you bring
your personality, nuance, and expertise to
make it truly shine.

Source: Marketing Against The Grain

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 2 Refine Prompts for Maximum Impact
If you take the first output AI gives you and run with it, that’s like hiring an eager intern and
accepting their first draft without any feedback.

Instead, follow Kieran’s “Rule of Five” — you’ve got to push the AI at least five times before you
get to something really good.

When Kieran was working on LinkedIn posts with ChatGPT, the first outputs were always
generic, best-practice garbage. So he pushed back, asked for more specifics, demanded
punchier lines, and treated it like a creative partner who needed guidance.

Iteration 4: Iteration 5:

Source: Marketing Against The Grain

The end product is the result of 5+ iterations, highly specific

instructions, and praising the good stuff (aka being a good
manager to your AI).

Remember, AI isn’t meant to give you one perfect answer. It’s

designed to give you different options that you can refine. Your
job is to guide it toward excellence through iteration.

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 3 Use AI in Your Go-To-Market Framework

If you want to grow your

business in 2025, you need to
understand how AI fits into every
stage of your customer journey.

Attract
AI is revolutionizing paid advertising, letting you go from A/B testing to A-Z testing with
tools that can generate and test dozens of creative variations.

Convert
We’re seeing game-changing results with AI-powered chat and personalized email –
we’re talking 80% increases in conversion rates with hyper-personalized content.

Close
AI is transforming how we handle sales development. Imagine having virtual BDRs that can
research companies, craft personalized outreach, and even handle initial conversations.

Delight
We’re seeing incredible results in customer support – at HubSpot, over 25% of our
support is now managed by AI, equivalent to more than 100 heads.

Just a couple years ago, these things were impossible. Now they’re giving companies real
competitive advantages. If you’re not thinking about how to implement AI across your entire
customer journey, you’re falling behind.

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 4 Scaling Prospecting Efforts
AI is absolutely game-changing for sales
prospecting. It’s doing things humans literally
can’t do at scale. We’re seeing three distinct AI-driven emails achieved a

94%
buckets where AI fits:

• Tasks where it’s worse than humans higher CVR than human-written ones
but worth doing for scale
• Tasks where it matches or beats
human performance
AI processes vast datasets to make intelligent
• Tasks that were previously impossible predictions about prospect needs, particularly
around key triggers like funding rounds, job
changes, and usage milestones.
AI actually outperforms humans in cold
AI handles the heavy lifting of personalization
prospecting scenarios. Why? Because when
and matching at scale, while humans focus on
you have limited information about a prospect,
high-value interactions and strategy. Imagine the
AI is better at profiling and matching solutions
heights you’ll reach when you combine them.
to potential problems. We saw this in our tests
— AI-driven emails achieved a 94% higher
conversion rate than human-written ones.

5 SEO Strategy
Google Search isn’t going anywhere. It’s still growing alongside new search platforms like TikTok
and Instagram. While AI chat tools may reshape some search behaviors, they won’t fundamentally
disrupt Google’s dominance because most users aren’t just looking for answers — they’re trying to
accomplish tasks like finding restaurants or making purchases.

Our data reveals that only about 10% of ranking content contains significant AI-generated text, and
Google already penalizes it. You gotta have humans in the loop.

“
I think the future of content is AI-assisted, where the AI is your
copilot. It makes suggestions, it could even write initial versions of
some text, but then the humans editing it, adding their own personal
experience and their own wisdom, is the future of content.

”
- Ethan Smith

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 AI excels at technical SEO tasks like keyword clustering and content
scoring. By analyzing billions of keywords and URLs, AI algorithms
can identify topic clusters and predict content performance. This
automation lets SEO professionals prioritize high-impact tasks like
understanding audience needs, and developing content strategies.

Looking ahead, search optimization will expand into chat

environments through strategic content placement and co-citations,
much like how link-building shaped traditional SEO.

6 Marketing Automation
After discovering GPT-4 could match or exceed human performance in sales outreach (or take
his job at Asana), Ethan DeWaal didn’t fight it. Instead, he built simple AI-powered tools to handle
repetitive tasks like call preparation, product documentation searches, and personalized outreach.

AI is accelerating the saturation of basic marketing tactics. When everyone can produce quality
content at scale, differentiation becomes harder. The winners aren’t those who resist automation or
blindly embrace it, but those who strategically use AI to amplify their unique strengths.

The formula is clear: Direct AI toward high-volume, repetitive work while preserving human
bandwidth for strategy and creativity.

Begin with targeted AI solutions for specific pain points, validate their impact, then expand
thoughtfully. This approach doesn’t replace marketers, but elevates them to focus on genuine
business growth drivers.

7 Building 1/1 Apps

The democratization of app development
represents a fundamental shift in how software
gets created. Using tools like GPT Engineer,
people with zero coding skills can now transform
ideas into working web applications in minutes
rather than months - complete with API
integrations, data processing, and core features. The implications are profound: Point solution
This evolution enables what Kieran and Kipp call software companies may face disruption as users
“one-to-one software” — highly personalized gain the ability to build custom versions of basic
applications built for individual needs rather than apps. Software engineering itself is evolving, with
mass markets. engineers becoming more like product managers.

Whether it’s Alex Lieberman creating a custom Most intriguingly, we’re entering an era of
workout generator during lunch or Kipp building “disposable apps,” or purpose-built tools for
a marketing intelligence dashboard, these tools short-term needs that traditional development
make it possible to quickly prototype and iterate could never justify. The key is having domain
on ideas that previously would have been too expertise and clear ideas about what problems
niche or expensive to pursue. need solving. The tools can handle the rest.

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 Part 3
Future-Proofing
Your Marketing Career
The future of marketing is so personalized,
it’ll feel like a one-on-one conversation
We’re approaching an inflection point in marketing. With AI giving us access to elite-agency-
level capabilities, mass marketing becomes less appealing. Why target millions when you can
create personalized experiences for each individual?

Marketing’s evolution follows a clear pattern of increasing engagement: from text to images
to video, and now toward fully interactive, personalized experiences. This shift is dissolving
the boundary between marketing and sales.

You may worry about AI replicating marketing approaches, but the real opportunity lies in
innovation — creating strategies that don’t exist in any training dataset.

The future marketer’s role centers on orchestrating AI-driven workflows: managing,

monitoring, iteration, and sequencing at scale, while pioneering breakthrough creative
approaches that cut through the algorithmic noise.

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Creativity and Strategic Thinking Are the Future
Sam Altman was probably right — AI will likely Let AI handle the routine. Focus your energy
automate 95% of marketing-related tasks in the on the creative and strategic work that truly
near future. But the remaining 5% will involve moves people.
deep human creativity, emotional connection,
and strategic insight.

And guess who’s better at that?

Instead of competing against AI, savvy

marketers should future-proof their careers by
amplifying the 5% that AI can’t touch.

AI isn’t going to craft those hot takes that make

your customers feel seen, or create marketing
campaigns that hit them right in the feels. It just
can’t nail that human element that makes truly
great marketing resonate.

What matters, now more than ever, is

understanding your customers at such a deep
level that you can bring their pain points to life in
creative, provocative, and sometimes humorous
ways. It’s about building real connections
through communities, creating content that
makes people feel something, and developing
brand moats that AI just can’t replicate.

Final Word
The future of marketing belongs to those who
can harness AI’s power while maintaining Remember:
human creativity and strategic thinking. Start AI isn’t replacing our creativity — it’s giving
small, experiment often, and focus on building us a new superpower to scale it.
systems that scale your unique strengths.

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