Will AI Take Over Marketing? Lessons from 2 Years of ChatGPT

In episode #2859, Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss the implications of AI, particularly ChatGPT, on the marketing industry. They explore the potential for AI to replace certain roles, the importance of adaptation, and the evolving role of marketers as they leverage AI tools to enhance productivity. Don’t forget to help us grow by subscribing and liking on YouTube! Check out more of Eric’s content (Leveling UP YT) and Neil’s videos (Neil Patel YT) TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: (00:00) The Impact of AI on Marketing (04:53) The Future of Marketers in an AI-Driven World (09:02) That’s it for today! Don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe! Go to https://www.marketingschool.io to learn more! Leave Some Feedback: What should we talk about next? Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with Us: Single Grain << Eric’s ad agency NP Digital << Neil’s ad agency X @neilpatel X @ericosiu

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:34Speaker 01

  Will AI replace marketers? What we learned after two years of ChatGPT being around.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  Alright, so let's start this off by saying that I'm very optimistic about technology, and Neil tends to be pessimistic about everything.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  Yes, about the whole world.

• 0:54Speaker 00

  You go first.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  So, you know, back when OpenAI first came around and then ChatGPT came out, I saw a big problem, and I never really felt AI would replace marketing at all. And there's two main reasons. One, I think the creativity to replace what you and I have and other amazing talent has. And I'm not saying we're the best or anything like that, but just if you're a good marketer, it's really hard to replace your creativity with something that's scraping the web and then coming out with outputs based on what they've seen in the past versus coming up with stuff that's new and fresh. The second thing is, is a lot of what they scrape on the web is inaccurate.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  So then it's affecting their decisions for the future based off of stuff that is inaccurate. And that is a hard problem to solve. Google has not been able to solve that problem, and they've tried so much since day one. I don't know how much they've invested into it, but my guess is over a billion bucks easily.

• 1:54Speaker 00

  So my take on it is, will AI replace marketers? Not the best ones, not even the good ones. I think it'll replace the below-average ones. And so I had a conversation with Seth Godin about this.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  If you do a job that AI can do. Either you're gonna figure it out first and change your job so that AI works for you. Or your boss is gonna figure out first and you're gonna lose your job.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  And we were just talking with so bestselling author wrote, by the way, he wrote a book called Lichpin, which we make all our employees read when we start, but that's I digress. And so I think this is no different than when you think about the industrial age, right? Everyone used to be farmers before, right? Then we moved into industrial age and then everyone kind of started doing like, you know, computer work, right? We call that blue collar work.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32Speaker 00

  Right? So I think there's gonna be another shift here. I think most people will learn how to leverage the power of AI and then they'll be enhanced by it. To your point, I think the best of the best people are the creative people that are constantly just a little bit ahead of the curve. If you're just a really good learner, you're talking to other people like, Neil's really good at getting on the phone with people and learning his his own way. I'm really good at like reading things and and then talking to people about it. If you can do that, you'll be to be ahead of the curve no matter what. And I think you'll have a significant advantage too, because you'll be able to compound yourself. But I think if you're below average, what happens with the below average people? They don't want to learn new things, right? They're the type of people where, you know, it's like they do something right now. It's like, oh, Neil, look, I did this, but they did it six months ago. It's something they should have done six months ago, right? They're too slow to adopt to things.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  And so I don't necessarily look at look at chat GPT as AI. I just look at AI as a whole. And I don't know if you saw this, there's that big investor conference. Did you see what happened? That was yesterday. So it was.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  In Saudi, right?

• 3:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, in Saudi.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  The cumulative capex, nine trillion dollars, nine trillion dollars. How do you recoup? How do you recoup? It's too much investment for many people's view. I say, I say it's still very reasonable capex. Nine trillion dollar is not too big, maybe too small.

• 3:48Speaker 00

  So Masayoshi Son came on and he's like, nine trillion expenditure capex on on on AI, on on the chips, right? He's like, that's cheap because over the next, you know, 10 years or so, that's only gonna be 5% of what the potential value is gonna be, right? So his whole point is that we're gonna scale quite a bit. You know, everyone's talking about these these super chip centers. I forgot what the the the giga, was it giga chip by Nvidia? Do you remember what I'm talking about?

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Uh, no.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  But yeah, okay, anyway, like, for example, Elon built like this giant cluster, right? Um, and he took like nineteen days to do it, right? And so we're gonna see a lot more of these. There's a lot of infrastructure work going into AI chips. And then Neil and I are not technologists in this sense. We're not pros at this, but my whole thing is like, if there's a lot of investment going into infrastructure right now, um, this, this has a lot of room to grow. And so my conclusion is AI will replace mediocre to bad marketers.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Now, this is what I'm really curious on, right? Because when we talked about this a few years ago, you're a big believer that AI would replace many, many more marketers. You're more optimistic about it back then than now. I'm curious what's changed for you.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  I tend to be like that, though, because usually when you've seen my patterns over the years, like when a new thing comes out, I'm like, oh, Neil, Clubhouse, this is the new thing, right? Right? And sometimes, and you're like, this is stupid. And like, you were right in that case, right? But sometimes I'm right, too, right? Sometimes I'll call it and it's like, oh, yeah, that, sometimes you'll call things, you'll be like, oh, you know, you're gonna buy these Facebook likes. I'm like, I don't think that's gonna work. And like, didn't work, right? So there's like certain things we'll try and like, we're gonna get a lot of things wrong. And then I think with ChatGPT, though, um, I think you, you, you look at what Sam Altman says, and obviously he's talking his own book here, but he's like, it's gonna replace ninety-five percent of people. I think that's a bit heavy now, because if ninety-five percent of people are replaced, what are they gonna do? Then it's gonna be like anarchy, right? When we can't have that.

• 5:41Speaker 00

  All right, so I wanted to take a second to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. So this is a agency peer group ran by my podcast co-host Neil Patel and myself, Eric Su, and these were nine and eight-figure agency owners, respectively. And what I will say is, at the end of the day, you wanna learn from people that have been there, done that. If you wanna grow your agency to seven figures, eight figures, and beyond, this is the group for you. And we bring in other agency owners to speak as well. And it's a great peer group where you can help each other out. And you're gonna learn how to acquire more clients, you're gonna learn how to take yourself out of the day-to-day, and to build the business of your dreams. And the cool thing, till November thirtieth, we are holding a special price, and you can apply at marketingschool.io/agency. And the great thing about it as well, if you try to get into group, there's a seven-day free trial, right?

• 6:23Speaker 00

  So, once November thirtieth hits, we're gonna increase the price by two hundred dollars per month. So right now, you're getting it at the lowest price possible. So go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more, and we'll see you inside.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  And I don't think... That ninety-five percent is a little bit heavy. I think it's extremely heavy.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  You know, you want to talk about mowing a lawn? Sure, you can create something that's programmatic and analyzes the landscape and the terrain and be like, okay, here's how you ideally mow the lawn or how much you watered or whatever it may be. But for a lot of stuff that isn't the blue collar jobs, like the white collar jobs, I do believe a lot of them are going to be hard to replace. I could be wrong. It really depends per industry and I've been wrong in many places, right? I just think, you know, when this AI first started coming out and people used to ask me this question, people used to always say, Neil, you're biased. You own a marketing agency. And I was like, Sam Altman is biased. He created an AI company. And honestly, I wasn't saying this to try to be

• 7:26Speaker 01

  biased or not. I really felt it wasn't replacing any, or it wasn't replacing most marketers. And the reason being is I'm like, look at what it's outputting. If you look at the progression of Chat GPT and what they're releasing, the quality is drastically slowing down on, or the abilities of what it can do is drastically slowing down, as in the innovation part. And I still think we're in the early innings, right? Like if it's in baseball, I would say first inning or second inning. But what I'm getting at is it's really hard to continually innovate and make it five percent better, ten percent better, fifty percent better. And for it to do extremely well, you need not fifty or a hundred percent better, you need leaps and bounds better. And I think that's extremely hard to do.

• 8:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think we'll, we'll see in due time, right? I think we're still, it's still very, you talk about innings, it's very early right now. So I think I'm, I'm really looking at the next five to 10 years or so. So, and we've talked about this on the podcast, we're bearish in the short, or more bearish in the short term, but very bullish in the long term. And I would say for me, typically when I call trends, I call them right for the long term. So, for example, Nvidia, I told my mom to buy that stock. Why? Because I bought Nvidia video, video game cards when I was like nine years old, right? No, did I know they're going to come into this AI thing? No, right? But at least I knew they're going to rip for a while, right? And so I think long term, it's going to do, I think it's going to help people be more productive because I think the mediocre and the bad marketers, it's going to be, hey, maybe you just shouldn't be doing marketing. Go do something else that's more productive that where AI can enhance you and

• 8:56Speaker 00

  you'll do a much better job. I do think we'll become a lot more productive as a society.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I totally agree. And I do think AI is going to change marketing, whether it's from the creation process, the systems and processes helping with boring tasks. It's definitely going to have an impact on marketing and it already has had an impact. It's just the aspect of it's going to replace all marketers is going to be tough for even the majority. But what is very realistic is everyone is going to have an AI assistant that's going to power you. You're going to have your own virtual buddy that is helping you do anything you want, or you're going to have specific agents that go and help you with specific tasks and job tasks or job roles that you need filled out.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  All right. So that is it for today, guys. Go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more about the Agency Owners Association, where we help agency owners grow. And that being said, we'll see you tomorrow.