Most marketers are using AI for the wrong things

In 2022, I co-founded a web3 review platform.

To build it, I worked personally with a UX designer and a software developer. Every screen, every flow, every interaction I had imagined had to go through someone else's hands before it became real. And it came at a cost I honestly couldn't afford at the time. Finding a good developer and a UX designer wasn't cheap, and what I spent on execution came directly out of the marketing budget I had planned to use to actually grow the thing. Every app or platform I'd ever wanted to build required either a technical co-founder or a fee. The idea was mine. The execution always depended on someone else.

That was three years ago.

Over the past few months, my husband and I have built tens of websites and platforms together. Admin panels, user panels, custom functionality. The monthly cost: a Claude subscription and domain registration. That's it.

When I zoom out and look at what actually changed, it's not that I got more technical. It's that the dependency is gone.

And I think most people haven't fully processed what that means yet.

Right now, the majority of people using AI are using it as a smarter search engine. A better writing assistant. A recipe generator, a fitness planner, a way to clean up email copy before hitting send. Useful? Yes. But that's the shallow end of what's actually available, and most people don't realize how much further it goes. Tbh, I'm jealous of anyone who hasn't really seen the possibilities yet because it's so mind blowing. :)

The assumption that's still sitting underneath a lot of this, quietly and mostly unchallenged, is that building real things is still for the technical people. That if you have an idea for a tool, an automation, an agent that would actually solve something meaningful at work, you need to find someone who can code, or budget for it, or wait until your company prioritizes it.

That assumption is out of date.

AI isn't giving technical people more power. It's eliminating the gap that kept everyone else out. The barrier was never imagination or problem clarity. It was the cost and dependency of execution. And that barrier is either gone or close enough that the difference barely matters anymore.

So what does this actually mean for your career?

The question shifts. It's no longer "do I have the technical skills to build this?" It's "do I have enough clarity about the problem to direct the build?"

And that's where I think the real career opportunity sits for marketers right now.

Not in learning to code. Not in becoming an AI power user for its own sake. In developing problem definition as an intentional skill, not just a byproduct of your job. In getting really, genuinely precise about what's broken, where it breaks, and what fixed looks like.

Because here's what I've noticed: the people who are building things that actually work, technical background or not, are the ones who walk in with that clarity. And the people who are spinning their wheels are often the ones who have the tools but not the problem map.

I've built a content repurposing engine, a pipeline forecasting model, and an account enrichment workflow over the past two weeks. Not because I learned to code. Because I've spent years sitting inside the broken versions of all three and I knew exactly what I wanted instead.

That's the skill. And it's one most marketers are already developing without realizing it.

The marketers who stand out in the next two to three years won't necessarily be the most technical ones. They'll be the ones who figured out that what they imagined but couldn't build before is now within reach, and did something about it.

You don't need to become a different kind of marketer. You need to stop assuming that the gap between your idea and its execution is still as wide as it used to be.