Digital Marketing · AI & Strategy
AI Is Your Sous-Chef. You’re Still the Head Chef.
Almost every marketer now uses AI. That’s exactly why it’s stopped being an advantage on its own — and why the businesses standing out are the ones who know what to hand off, and what never to.
AI adoption in marketing has crossed from “emerging trend” to “baseline expectation” in the space of about two years. Almost everyone is using it now. Which creates a strange, counterintuitive problem: when a tool becomes universal, using it stops being a differentiator, and the businesses that only use AI — without adding anything of their own — start to sound exactly like everyone else.
Read those three numbers together and the picture is clear: adoption is no longer the advantage. How you use it is.
Why AI-only content tends to sound the same
This isn’t a criticism of the tools — it’s simply how they work. Language models are built to predict the most statistically likely next word, which means their default output gravitates toward the average of everything they’ve been trained on. Left entirely alone, AI produces content that’s competent, correct, and largely indistinguishable from what every competitor’s AI is also producing. The unusual phrasing, the specific opinion, the thing that actually sounds like your business — that gets smoothed away unless a person puts it back in.
AI raises the floor on speed and polish. The ceiling is still set by human judgement, opinion and taste — the parts of marketing a model can’t manufacture on its own.
The sous-chef model
A good sous-chef is genuinely invaluable — fast, precise, handles the repetitive prep work brilliantly. But nobody expects the sous-chef to decide the menu, taste the final dish, or take responsibility for what goes out to the table. That’s the head chef’s job. It’s a useful way to think about where AI actually belongs in a marketing workflow.
The Sous-Chef (AI)
Handles the prep work
- First-draft research and summarising
- Generating multiple headline or caption options
- Repurposing one piece of content into several formats
- Reporting and data summarisation
The Head Chef (You)
Owns the judgement
- Deciding what’s actually worth saying
- Final edit, tone and brand voice
- Real opinions, specific to your business
- What goes out under your name, and what doesn’t
The two ways this goes wrong
- Publishing AI output unedited — fast, but indistinguishable from what everyone else is publishing too
- Refusing to use AI at all — slower, and increasingly a real competitive disadvantage against businesses using it well
How we actually use this at Big Sky
We use AI tools daily — for research, first drafts, and speeding up reporting. But strategy, final wording, and what actually represents a client’s business always goes through a real person before it’s published. That’s not a marketing line; it’s the only way to avoid the sameness problem the data above is describing.
The bigger picture
AI isn’t going anywhere, and pretending otherwise isn’t a strategy. But with adoption this widespread, it’s stopped being the thing that sets a business apart. What still does is the same thing it always did — a real point of view, applied consistently, that a model can’t invent on its own.
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