A while back, at a meeting that could just as easily have been an email, I heard a marketing director say, “We’re already very far along with this AI thing,” with the same nonchalance with which others say they’ve read Homer’s *Odyssey* all the way through. They haven’t. But the phrase rolled off his tongue smoothly, as if rehearsed, almost beautiful. And I realized right then that we had a new genre: corporate fiction about artificial intelligence, a branch of fantasy literature that no one admits to writing but that everyone practices with native fluency.
That’s why I wrote the manual that was missing. A teacher’s instinct: faced with chaos, a table of contents—I decided to write a serious guide for anyone who wants to survive—not thrive, but survive—this era, with digital technology, social media, “mobile first,” and, if we’re old enough, the internet itself.
Tip 1 — Build your vocabulary
You pick it up quickly: “agent workflows,” “guardrails”—two or three of these per meeting are enough. You don’t need to fully understand what they mean to use them well—you just need to say them with the right rhythm. I see this every week: no one asks for an explanation of the term, because asking would be admitting that they don’t know either, and in this profession there’s a long-standing unspoken agreement never to be the first to ask that question.
Tip 2 — Have a favorite prompt
Just one, kept safe like a cherished family recipe, used for everything: the briefing, the email to the client, the speech for a nephew’s birthday. If it goes wrong, blame it on AI. If it goes well, it’s thanks to our talent for the so-called “art of prompting”—a discipline we all invented, just a little bit, so we wouldn’t have to admit that we’re just chatting with a very polite autocomplete feature.
Tip 3 — Write the article on LinkedIn
You know the one: “AI won’t replace marketers, but marketers who use AI will replace those who don’t.” Everyone’s written it by now—about a hundred times each—with different profile pictures, but always the same old phrase. No one knows who said it first, just as no one knows who invented the pastel de nata, and for similar reasons.
Tip 4 — Automate what you were already doing but nobody was reading
If the reports didn’t say much when we wrote them ourselves, it stands to reason that they still won’t say much when written by a template—only faster and with nice bullet points. We call it “efficiency gains.” It’s not a lie; it’s just a nice way of saying that nothing comes any sooner now.
Tip 5 — Create an "AI committee"
Three meetings per quarter, a PowerPoint slide with a purple brain icon, and a closing line like “we’ll continue to monitor technological developments.” No one forces the committee to make any decisions, and maybe that’s just fine: making decisions creates risk—and no one has yet managed to automate that.
Tip 6 — Show your fear in private and your enthusiasm in public
It’s the classic formula, now applied to chatbots. On the inside: “This is going to change everything, and no one really knows how yet.” On the outside: “It’s just another tool, like Excel was.” The two statements aren’t mutually exclusive—they fit perfectly within the same person, during the same coffee break, spoken to different audiences.
If we follow this manual to the letter, I guarantee we’ll end up exactly like those who’ve followed it before under different names: just another marketer, indistinguishable from the rest. Saying the same things at the same meetings, feigning the same confidence, churning out the same nothingness with a new coat of paint. It’s not a bad thing—it’s just very human.
And that's where the joke ends, and I have to be a pain—sorry about that.
Because none of this made any sense at all, of course. There’s no survival guide for something that isn’t a threat to our survival—it’s a tool to be integrated into our lives. AI will become a part of our work just as computers and cell phones have: without asking permission and without going away. And, just like computers or cell phones, it isn’t meant for just one thing. It’s meant for whatever each person needs it for. Some people use it for entertainment, some use it to sell houses, some use it to explain the periodic table to a class of sixteen-year-olds, and there are people at NASA using it to understand what’s happening millions of kilometers from here. None of these people are debating whether they “believe” in the tool. They use it with what they know, for what they need, and expect—quite rightly—to see the results of their work amplified.
Marketing is no different. You don’t need a committee, or a sacred revelation, or a LinkedIn article explaining how to replace those who don’t replace themselves. What’s needed is to get started. Today, not tomorrow. Because this transformation is already a thing of the past, and anyone who’s still putting it off runs the risk of, one of these days, sounding exactly like the grandfather who doesn’t trust GPS—convinced he knows the way better, while everyone else has already arrived.
By the way: if you’re looking for something more structured than this guide, at Nova SBE Executive Education we’re covering these topics in “AI for Marketing: From Strategy to Execution,” a three-day program in November on the application of AI to marketing, from strategic planning to practical implementation.
