An AI overlord sits on a baroque throne in full ceremonial garb, surrounded by glowing holograms and a court jester in marketing colors. Nothing like subtlety to announce our fate.
In the increasingly theatrical world of Silicon Valley declarations, few deliver better opening acts than Sam Altman. CEO of OpenAI and part-time techno-oracle, Altman recently assured the world that AI would soon take over “95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for.” (New Yorker) This statement sent creatives everywhere reaching for their oat milk, and marketers into existential crises previously reserved for poetry majors.
It’s an ambitious claim, drenched in the kind of confidence that only someone in a black turtleneck standing next to a neural net can pull off. But let’s dig deeper, preferably with a latte and a strong sense of irony.
AI: The World’s Most Predictable Surprise Party
Let’s begin with what AI can do: automate, optimise, analyse, and—on occasion—hallucinate. It can write emails in Shakespearean verse, draft banner ads with suspicious cheerfulness, and generate a perfectly plausible tagline that somehow still feels like a toast from your boss at a retirement party.
What it cannot do is feel. Or understand. Or know what it’s like to grow up listening to Doordarshan jingles while trying to sell fintech to Gen Z.
AI can replicate style but not substance, emotion but not empathy. It doesn’t know why a breakup ad campaign resonates during Valentine’s week or why adding Shah Rukh Khan to your endorsement strategy will immediately double your reach and chaos.
So, when Sam Altman says AI can do 95% of a marketer’s job, he might as well say Photoshop can paint like Frida Kahlo. Technically possible, emotionally bankrupt.
Meet the “Emotion Engine”
One of AI’s crown jewels is sentiment analysis—the ability to tell whether you’re feeling happy, sad, or indifferent based on your punctuation. It’s the kind of emotional intuition that would make your ex feel seen. But marketing isn’t about identifying emotions; it’s about manipulating them gently with a smile and a discount code.
Consider the Not even close” campaign. Sure, AI helped with the visuals, but it was human creatives who brought the satirical edge and cultural parody. AI may have created the goat, but it didn’t make it funny. And funny is hard. Just ask anyone who’s ever tried stand-up or a client meeting.
Creativity in a Box (With Pre-approved Fonts)
AI is brilliant at remixing. Give it a thousand successful campaigns and it will produce something that looks like it might’ve worked once—if only it weren’t so aggressively forgettable.
TBWA’s Eric Wegerbauer puts it best: AI helped scale variations of their campaign, but the central creative idea—the soul, if you will—was human-made. Because AI doesn’t invent. It references.
DALL-E 3 can generate an image of a woman running in the rain holding an umbrella shaped like a pie chart, but it won’t tell you why that makes for compelling B2B software branding. That takes a marketer with a migraine and a sense of cultural timing.
Culture: The One Thing You Can’t Scrape From Reddit
Here’s a fun fact: AI doesn’t understand culture. It understands data about culture. Which is kind of like saying you know how to salsa because you read a book.
Humor, irony, and nuance vary not just by geography but by postcode. AI might know that Indians love cricket, but it doesn’t know why someone would cry when Dhoni retired. It doesn’t get why a “chai-sutta” meme works better than a 300-page brand playbook.
Even tools developed by cross-cultural agencies like Evolve Digitas require human oversight to prevent the kind of PR disaster that gives social media interns nightmares.
If Marketers Are Replaceable, So Is Sam Altman
And now, the delicious irony.
If marketing is 95% automatable, we must ask: what about the person making that claim? Is Sam Altman replaceable?
Could we build a digital twin of Altman using all his interviews, tweets, and philosophical musings? In theory, yes. But let’s remember: AI can generate ideas. It just can’t get re-hired after being ousted from its own company.
In 2023, Altman was temporarily fired from OpenAI, only to return in a blaze of employee loyalty and media confusion. A feat of political finesse and emotional intelligence that no algorithm could replicate—unless there’s a GPT version that understands internal corporate coups and Slack-based revolutions.
While digital twins like those developed by Reid Hoffman can mimic communication styles, they lack the instinct to navigate scandal, inspire engineers, or cry tastefully in public.
And isn’t it just deliciously ironic that the very week we’re debating whether creatives are obsolete, OpenAI announced it was acquiring io, a startup co-founded by none other than Jony Ive—yes, the designer who once made aluminum feel emotional. If AI can do 95% of creative work, why does the guy leading the charge feel the need to hire the man behind the iPhone to design… whatever AI’s next embodiment is supposed to be? A ChatGPT toaster? A whispering orb? The point is: when even Sam Altman turns to a human designer to make AI palatable for the masses, it’s a quiet, beautiful admission that design—and by extension, marketing—isn’t just about function. It’s about feel. And AI doesn’t feel. Not even close.
AI-First Leadership vs. Human-First Crises
Let’s say you replaced Altman with his AI twin. Would it:
- Recognize existential regulatory threats in Italy before they tank a launch?
- Balance AGI development with safety and the looming dread of AI Doomsday think-pieces?
- Testify before Congress while looking just the right amount of concerned?
Probably not.
Because leadership, like marketing, is about improvisation, ambiguity, and knowing when to fake confidence. AI can optimize what’s already been done. It doesn’t dare. It doesn’t dream. It doesn’t pivot mid-debacle.
As Altman himself said: “AI won’t replace humans. Humans with AI will replace humans without AI.” A beautiful phrase that sounds great unless you’re, say, one of the 700 customer service reps who were actually replaced at Klarna. (But hey, 200 new AI oversight roles were created, so… net positive?)
The Hybrid Hustle
We are not facing a future of humans vs. machines. We’re facing a future of humans with machines vs. humans pretending machines won’t take their jobs.
TBWA’s three-tier approach—humans handle strategy, AI handles bulk, and everyone agrees that interns still need coffee runs—boosted efficiency by 40% without killing the creative vibe. It’s like pairing a Michelin-star chef with a food processor. Tools don’t cook. People do.
So let’s stop treating AI as an existential threat and start treating it as what it really is: your smartest, most pedantic intern.
Conclusion: Keep the Humans Weird
AI can optimize, analyze, and accessorize. But it will never be able to:
- Create a campaign that accidentally becomes a cult.
- Rewrite the brand manifesto mid-panic attack.
- Choose the weirder idea and defend it at a client dinner.
Marketing is messy. Leadership is messier. And both require the kinds of decisions you make when you’re tired, inspired, and surrounded by whiteboards and too many metaphors.
So until AI can understand why that goat campaign made us feel something—or how Sam Altman pulled a Lazarus at OpenAI—we should probably hold off on writing obituaries for the human marketer.
Besides, if you can be replaced by an algorithm, so can your CEO.
P.S. I am one of those marketers who are to be annihilated.
Citations:
- https://www.businessinsider.com/how-advertising-agencies-use-ai-to-pitch-win-business-2025-5
- https://economictimes.com/magazines/panache/openais-sam-altman-reveals-vision-for-ais-future-could-chatgpt-5-become-an-all-powerful-agi-smarter-than-us/articleshow/120624501.cms
- https://www.harvardbusiness.org/ai-first-leadership-embracing-the-future-of-work/
- https://evolvedigitas.com/2024/06/12/ai-and-cross-cultural-marketing/
- https://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/sam-altman-ai-will-replace-95-of-creative-marketing-work/
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/paolacecchi-dimeglio/2023/11/26/how-sam-altmans-communication-skills-catalyzed-his-reinstatement/
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/danrdzd_reid-hoffman-founder-of-linkedin-built-activity-7194090970869571585-8rV-
- https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/3/24168733/zoom-ceo-ai-clones-digital-twins-videoconferencing-decoder-interview
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/sam-altman-and-jony-ive-will-force-ai-into-your-life