There's no shortage of AI content in marketing right now.
Whitepapers, webinars, LinkedIn “prompt” guides. Most of it is either too theoretical to act on or too promotional to trust.
On Tuesday night, we brought together a group of senior marketers for something different: an honest, no-holds-barred conversation about what AI is actually doing to this industry. No vendor pitches, no keynote polish. Just smart people in a room trying to figure it out together, because nobody has this fully figured out yet, and pretending otherwise isn't helping anyone.
Here's a quick summary of what CMOs and Senior marketers are thinking about in AI right now:
The hype cycle is real, and most people are starting to see through it. The group landed quickly on a familiar tension: businesses tend to overestimate what AI will change in the next six months and dramatically underestimate what it will change over the next ten years. The implication isn't to ignore AI. It's to stop treating it like a sprint and start building for the long game.
"Good enough, fast and cheap" is the real disruptor. The biggest immediate pressure isn't AGI, but instead it's value compression. AI can now produce work that's good enough, quickly enough, cheaply enough, that clients are starting to question what they're actually paying for. That's not a future problem. It's a now problem, and it's reshaping conversations in procurement, in pitches, and in renewals. As we say, the future of marketing is here, just not evenly distributed yet.
Which raises the harder question: what is the agency for? If AI can handle significant portions of the heavy lifting that used to justify day rates, the role of the agency has to evolve fast. The room didn't land on a clean answer, because there isn't one yet. But the direction of travel was clear: agencies that survive will be the ones that shift from execution to judgment, from output to outcomes, and from doing to directing. The creative and strategic instincts that can't be prompted into existence are where the real value sits. You can actually read more about Tim's (CCO at Rival) thoughts on what it means to develop Creative Taste in the age of AI in his latest piece for AdAge here.
The "AI smell" problem is getting worse. Several people admitted they can immediately detect AI-generated copy, emails, and feedback and that detection triggers an instant devaluation. Not just of the content, but of the sender. As AI output becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, the gap between that and genuinely human-led work is going to matter more, not less. For premium brands especially, the last mile of delivery still needs to evidence a human.
Budgets are quietly shifting back to fundamentals. More than one person mentioned moving spend away from centralised digital performance marketing toward in-person, experiential, non-performance measured, and creator-led work. The logic is simple: trust is increasingly scarce, and the channels that have it are the ones built on actual human relationships. Technology has made it easier to reach people and harder to connect with them.
The real ask is execution, not education. The room wasn't short on frameworks. What people actually wanted was the practical next step: how do you integrate AI into real workflows, with real teams, in a way that doesn't just create a new silo or a new line on the org chart? The theory is largely settled. The implementation is where everyone is genuinely stuck - do you focus on learning how to interact with the latest model when the hype around the next model invalidates what you’ve just learnt?
Whilst the rest of the marketing wolrd has been shouting about AI for the past year, we at Rival have been building. We've been testing, learning, and developing what a truly tech-enabled, AI-Native marketing consultancy that's fit for the future actually looks like. The TL;DR it's a marathon not a sprint. You can read our collection of learnings here or you can join the next Marathon meetup in London at the end of May.
Our aim is not to broadcast answers, but to find them with the people best placed to do so.
If you were in the room on Tuesday, thank you for making it worth being in. If you weren't, we do this regularly. The next one is worth your evening.
