Hi Marketing Friends!
I want to talk about a phrase that's been showing up a lot lately: human-in-the-loop. It sounds a bit like a gymnastics move or something you'd see at a circus, but jokes aside, we all know it means AI + human. It's actually one of my favorite phrases right now because it addresses head on that AI is not replacing marketers or the strategy we're doing, but it is changing how we work. I also think it's one of the most important ideas in marketing right now: the marriage of humans + AI.
AI Isn't Coming for Your Job
Before I get into my excitement around human-in-the-loop, I want to address a fear I keep hearing: that AI will replace all marketing staff. I don't believe that will happen, now or in the future. I do believe it will replace some of the functions marketers have owned over the past decade. And here's the exciting part: it gives us an opportunity to pivot back to a time when we focused on fewer distribution channels and fewer mounds of copywriting, and more on building trust with customers, talking to prospects 1:1, and finding new opportunities with partners that align with our brand priorities.
Here's what I've come to believe over the past few years, as I've used and relied on AI more than I ever expected to when I first started using LLMs: AI didn't come to replace your job. It came to clear out everything standing between you and the parts of your job that actually require you.
We've Been Stitching, Not Strategizing
Think about what most of us have been doing for the last several years. We've been buried in tabs, jumping between a social scheduler, an SEO tool, a CRM, Google Analytics, a content doc, an ad platform, and a listening tool, just trying to hold one coherent strategy in our heads while doing ten different mechanical tasks. That's not strategy execution. That's stitching tools together to get one project out the door. And stitching is exactly the kind of work AI is good at.
What Only You Can Do
What AI is not good at, and what I don't think it will be good at anytime soon, is knowing your customer the way you do. It can't talk to a customer the way you can. It can't attend an event and build a real relationship, and it can't replicate your background and experience. It doesn't know that your buyer flinches at the words "API integration" because they've heard them a thousand times this month. It doesn't know that your CEO wants a certain tone in every social interaction. It doesn't know which risks are worth taking for your brand and which ones aren't, because it doesn't have your intuition, tenacity, or judgment. That judgment, by the way, was built from years of actually doing the work on brands and growing up in a space that has become exponentially harder to break through and compete in.
So What Does Human-in-the-Loop Actually Mean?
It's simpler than it sounds. The AI does the heavy lifting on the mechanical stuff (the drafting, the formatting, the first pass at an idea), and you stay exactly where you belong: in the driver's seat, making the calls that require a human brain and a human gut check.
You're not reviewing AI's work like a manager approving a stranger's homework. You're using it as an extension of your own thinking, a way to get your half-formed idea out of your head and onto the page faster, so you can spend your energy sharpening it instead of typing it from scratch.
Less Tactical, More Strategic
I think that's the real shift happening right now, and it's the opposite of scary once you sit with it. For years, marketers have been asked to do more with less, and a lot of us have quietly burned out trying to be both the strategist and the entire execution team. Human-in-the-loop AI doesn't take away the strategist part. It takes away the part where you also had to be the copywriter and the social manager and the web manager, all while leading strategy and growth. That means the skills that made you good at this job in the first place (your instincts, experiences, your relationships) matter more than ever now.
This is a big part of why we built Adze the way we did. We didn't want to build something that tries to run your marketing for you while you watch from the sidelines. We built it to sit next to you, do the parts that eat your time, and ask for your input and follow your strategic direction.
The Loop Needs a Human
So if you've been feeling that pit in your stomach reading the headlines that AI is replacing more jobs, including marketing jobs, I'd gently push back on the fear and ask that you rethink your role and the role of AI in your day to day work. You're not becoming less necessary. You're becoming more necessary in the parts of the job that were always the hardest to automate and the most fun to do well. The loop needs a human in it. That's you. That was always going to be you.