At Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference, several corporate executives discussed the boundaries of AI in marketing and creative work. The common consensus among attendees was that AI can significantly enhance execution efficiency, but it still struggles to replace humans in creative ideation, aesthetic judgment, and brand expression.
AI is better suited for repetitive production.
Mike Murphy, head of marketing at the beverage brand Liquid Death, said the company heavily uses AI behind the scenes, with even the team joking about Anthropic’s Claude on Slack. However, he believes that true original creativity is not AI’s strong suit.
He cited an example where Liquid Death partnered with Spotify to launch a Bluetooth-enabled urn, with the concept that “you can keep listening to music even after death.” This idea was proposed by the company’s internal artists and comedy creators, with a collaboration cost of approximately hundreds of thousands of dollars, covered by Spotify. Murphy said this marketing campaign generated about 600 million earned media impressions and allowed the brand to track changes in brand awareness, sales, and traffic.
He also mentioned that the company’s core metric for measuring content effectiveness is simple: “Is it worth sharing?” In his view, if content fails to truly resonate with users, no matter how cheap or frequent its production, it may simply be a waste of budget.
Human judgment still leads in creative decisions.
Vishal Sood, President of AI Brand and Creative Management Platform Typeface, said that AI is currently not good at “taste and judgment.” He cited the view of AI researcher Andrej Karpathy that people can outsource parts of their thinking, but not understanding itself.
Sood believes that AI's strength lies in rapidly generating different versions around existing ideas, including images, storyboards, and draft copy, and it is well-suited for handling large-scale repetitive tasks, especially in B2B marketing. He mentioned that one client increased their email click-through rate by 2 percentage points through AI personalization, nearly tripling their previous level.
In large enterprises, a single marketing visual often needs to be adapted to hundreds of different digital media sizes—a process that used to take months. Sood says this is exactly where AI can make the biggest impact.
Athenahealth’s Chief Marketing Officer, Stacy Simpson, also said the team will widely use AI in operational processes to shorten time-to-market and reduce wait times between steps. However, she emphasized that while AI can enter the creative process, it will not be involved in generating creative ideas themselves.
It's not about the tool, but how you use it.
Simpson said the standard for deciding whether to use AI is straightforward: Does it truly solve the problem, rather than just being used because it’s available? She believes that the same models and tools can yield completely different results depending on the person, and the ultimate difference lies in judgment, contextual understanding, and experience.
Caitlin Allen, Chief Marketing Officer at Simbe Robotics, believes that one reason for the proliferation of “AI slop” is that there is too much output and too little input. She says that many companies, when creating creative content, focus more on what they want to say rather than first understanding what their audience truly wants to hear.
In her view, the more valuable direction for AI is to automate repetitive tasks in “listening,” helping marketing teams identify what users care about more quickly, rather than simply increasing output.
Brex, a fintech company, President Ben Gammell also stated that the company views AI as an accelerator for existing employees, not as a reason for layoffs. What truly matters for businesses is not whether to adopt AI, but which tasks must be performed by humans and which processes are better suited for models.