Over the past 18 months, I've spent more time thinking about AI than I ever expected. Like many companies, we started with ChatGPT, then a shared workspace, and eventually built our own agentic AI platform, LQ Brain.
Going into it, I thought the biggest benefit would be efficiency. Write content faster. Analyze spreadsheets faster. Summarize meetings faster.
I was wrong.
The biggest change wasn't speed. It was time to insight.
That phrase came from a recent conversation with our SVP of Product and Technology, Ty Martin. He described his entire charter in three words: time to insight. It stuck with me because it perfectly captures what AI is actually changing inside marketing organizations.
Marketing has never suffered from a lack of data. We have dashboards, reports, CRM data, call recordings, customer surveys, website analytics, campaign metrics...we're drowning in information.
What we've always lacked is the ability to turn that information into useful decisions quickly enough to matter.
That's where AI has fundamentally changed my thinking.
Take customer research. We recently built a workflow that analyzes thousands of customer phone calls, emails, and chats to identify patterns in how buyers think. Going into it, we had a few strong hypotheses about why performance was changing. The data proved several of them wrong. More importantly, it uncovered nuances we probably never would have found manually. For example, we thought there was a product fit issue in certain states resulting in poor lead quality when in reality it was a messaging issue. Change the conversation in the sales call and poor leads become great leads.
Marketers were still needed to understand those nuances, but AI helped us get those questions and answers faster. For months, the conversation has centered on whether AI will replace people. I don't think that's the right debate. Like it has been with every other technical advancement, AI is not replacing humans. It is making the role of the marketer evolve.
What I'm seeing is that AI gets us to the last mile remarkably fast. The human still has to cross the finish line. They are still needed to understand nuances, to make judgments, to add context. In many ways, human judgment and intelligence has become more valuable, not less, because we're spending less time gathering information and more time deciding what to do with it.
Ironically, the hardest part of building AI into a marketing organization hasn't been the AI itself. It has been understanding how to discern those subtleties and produce the right outcomes. How to structure the data so it can reason accurately, which sources to connect the information to (and which ones not to), what is the right amount of information to feed to the AI.
The harder question, now that AI is commonplace, is knowing when to use AI and when a traditional automation is actually the better tool. And that is where we still need humans who understand organizational design.
The companies that get the most value from AI are not the ones with the most sophisticated models. They are the ones that build organizations capable of moving from question to insight faster than their competitors, with humans who know what to do once they get there. What they're really building is a shorter distance between a question and an answer.
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