Marketing leaders face the challenge of using AI for scale without losing the human emotion and creativity that make stories resonate.
Andrea Roberts, Industry Advisor at the Australian Centre for AI in Marketing, explains that success comes from partnership, not replacement, with AI acting as a creative catalyst and humans as storytellers.
She urges brands to apply AI with clear purpose, guided by ethics, transparency, and a non-negotiable human review to protect authenticity and trust.
Marketing leaders are realizing that AI isn’t here to steal the spotlight, it’s here to share the stage. The power lies in partnership, where AI handles the heavy lifting of speed and scale while humans bring the story to life with empathy, humor, and cultural insight. The challenge now is focus, with less time spent chasing shiny new tools and more time spent defining the business problems that truly need solving.
That’s the core argument from Andrea Roberts, an award-winning Chief Marketing Officer and strategic board advisor with over 25 years of experience in sectors like fintech and healthcare. Currently serving as an Industry Advisor to the Australian Centre for AI in Marketing, Roberts views the widespread fixation on tools within the industry as a distraction from the real work of solving customer problems.
"Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. AI is the perfect example of a tool that presents many things you could do, but that you probably don't need to do," Roberts says. One of the most critical mistakes leaders can make is getting caught in the endless cycle of new tools without a clear purpose, she explains.
Questions before code: Instead, her advice is to flip the script and ground every decision in business outcomes first. "What is the business outcome you're looking for? What does the customer genuinely need? And what is the problem you're trying to solve?" Only then can you effectively determine where AI can provide a better outcome, Roberts says.
Catalyst, not creator: Once that strategic filter is in place, the real partnership can begin. "I see AI as a catalyst. A creative catalyst, but with humans as the real storytellers," she explains.
Generative AI tools excel at high-speed production and scaling content, Roberts continues. But they also lack the fundamental human element that makes marketing connect with an audience's core emotions. "Think about things that are at the heart of the most compelling communication: empathy, humor, context, and originality. Humans understand why their audience would care, what emotional ingredients might be needed, such as pain, joy, happiness, and pride. That is uniquely human."
Save our souls: Without that human touch, however, the output can feel hollow, Roberts cautions. "A tagline generated by AI might be 'grammatically perfect', but soulless and not really aligned with your own brand's identity, which is why a human should refine the drafts produced by AI to polish the language, inject storytelling and context, and add emphasis where it's needed."
As the "AI bubble" shows signs of deflating, a focus on strategy is gaining traction. Now, enterprises are starting to demand measurable results over vendor promises. Meanwhile, the industry is moving toward AI adoption with a clear purpose: to solve specific problems and improve the customer experience overall.
But using AI to produce campaigns at an unprecedented scale also introduces significant risks, Roberts explains. For example, recent controversies over AI and authenticity are precisely the kinds of brand integrity challenges that she believes require a formal governance framework.
So how do brands manage this exposure? Roberts' answer is to establish "clear ethical guardrails." More specifically, this means being transparent with audiences, a practice gaining popularity as fines for unlabeled GenAI content become more common.
The non-negotiable human edit: For Roberts, striking the right balance means erring on the side of respect and "not using generative AI to fabricate endorsement or deepfake-style content that could mislead." "Never publish any AI content unedited," she says. "It needs a human review for tone, accuracy, bias, and cultural sensitivity." This requires understanding AI's limitations from the outset and treating its output as a first draft.
An 'AI ethics' checklist: To formalize the process, she recommends creating an "AI ethics checklist." The tool would help teams vet campaigns for issues like "bias, diversity, imagery, compliance with copyright, and making sure nothing's stolen or plagiarized." With ongoing legal debates, the copyright issue is particularly tricky, she says. Now, a formal checkpoint may be necessary as a result.
Ultimately, Roberts sees the future of AI in marketing as one where the greatest opportunities and risks are intrinsically linked. Massive scale without proper governance can damage a brand, and democratized access to creative tools doesn't guarantee valuable results. In closing, she advises leaders to use this tension as a constant point of reflection, to "challenge ourselves and others on those more human considerations around ethics, values, and trust," and to continually revisit the 'can vs. should' question that guides her.
"Innovating with AI without losing the human magic that makes marketing truly connect with its customers is the goal," she concludes. "Maintaining that human magic is my North Star, because it is essential to great marketing."
