AI is already making marketing assets faster and cheaper and easier to produce. But if these advantages are available to everyone, perhaps the more interesting question is what marketing teams choose to do next.
Last night I joined a Women in AI debate hosted by Gate One at Havas, built around a deceptively simple question: where does AI have most value for marketing, innovation or efficiency?
At the beginning of the evening, efficiency had the room. By the end, the dial had shifted towards innovation. I’ll declare my hand early. I voted for innovation at the beginning, and I was still there at the end.
Not because I underestimate the value of efficiency. Far from it. We’re already seeing AI remove huge amounts of repetitive production, accelerate analysis and make things possible with smaller teams and budgets that would previously have required considerably more resource.
Ksenia Barton of TikTok articulated this brilliantly from the efficiency side, arguing that AI is changing the economics of marketing because, as the cost of execution falls, we can spend less of our time resizing, localising and producing, and more of it on the things many of us actually came into this industry to do: understand people, find the insight, develop the strategy and create the idea. But she also made an observation that rather elegantly complicated the argument for efficiency: making marketing cheaper doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve made the business grow.
That, for me, was where the debate became much more interesting.
Rose Kitson, Chief Impact Officer at Havas UK & Ireland, brought evidence from Havas’s recent global research into public attitudes towards AI, Avoiding the AI Efficiency Trap, making the point that marketing isn’t ultimately judged by how efficiently we produce it, but by whether people notice it, trust it, act on it and feel differently about the brand as a result.
The research suggests consumers are remarkably alert to the difference. Half of respondents said AI can make brands look, feel or sound the same, while 51% said its use in brand experiences could make brands appear to be cutting corners. Yet where AI genuinely creates value for the customer, the same research found four times higher engagement, 1.6 times higher brand desire and 1.5 times greater purchase consideration. The opportunity, therefore, isn’t simply to ask how much cost AI can remove, but how much new value it can create.
Yvonne Chien, CMO of Saïd Business School, pushed that thought further. As AI increasingly shapes how people discover, compare and choose, she argued that brand perception and affinity may become more important, not less, while conversational AI gives marketers the possibility of moving beyond inferred segments towards experiences that actually respond to what an individual needs. There is another part of this that I think is fundamental, and which became clearer to me as the discussion unfolded: efficiency only becomes innovation when human wisdom and judgement are applied to the capacity AI creates.
The human in the loop isn’t simply there as a final check on the machine. Humans provide context, curiosity, empathy and judgement; they understand the subtleties of a customer problem, recognise when something may be technically correct but creatively uninteresting, and make choices about what is actually worth doing. That is where the value of the time AI gives back to us becomes interesting.
Madlen Nicolau, CMO of Hexagon AB, brought this to life through her own experience. AI has enabled Hexagon to achieve considerable operational efficiencies, but she was equally clear that humans still need to provide the creative idea, direction, expertise and final judgement. The human, as she described it, remains the “innovation mind” behind the technology.
As the debate unfolded, efficiency and innovation began to feel less like opposing arguments and more like parts of the same equation. AI can create capacity while human judgement determines its value and innovation is what happens when we use that capacity wisely. And this is ultimately why I remain firmly on the side of innovation.
If we simply use AI to create more content, more quickly and at lower cost, we may become more productive, but we haven’t necessarily become more useful, more distinctive or more valuable to our customers. The real prize is what happens when we consciously reinvest the time and capacity AI releases back into human thinking: deeper insight, braver ideas, greater creativity, better decisions and ultimately experiences that work harder for customers and businesses.
That’s very much the philosophy we believe in at Inviqa. Technology matters enormously, but technology on its own isn’t the answer. The opportunity lies in bringing synthetic intelligence together with human imagination, evidence, experience and judgement to solve meaningful problems, create better customer experiences and, critically, deliver better business outcomes.
AI will undoubtedly make marketing more efficient. We should embrace that rather than resist it. But we should also be ambitious about what we do with the space it creates. Efficiency is the dividend, but human ingenuity turns it into innovation. That is the exciting frontier; and where the real opportunity begins.
