By Brandon Keenen, CEO and Founder, ViVV LABS
I believe in AI. It’s extraordinary. It will change marketing forever. It is already transforming medicine, law, engineering, design, and content, and it is only getting faster.
But while everyone is excited about the future, I worry we are heading into dangerous territory without anyone holding the wheel.
At recent events like AdvertisingWeek and FutureWeek, the message is similar. AI is boosting productivity. Workflows are automated. Teams are being freed up to focus on the important stuff. But let’s be honest. What is really happening is mass headcount reduction, packaged as innovation.
Yes, AI helps us move faster. But in the rush to make marketing cheaper and more efficient, we are quietly stripping out the thing that made it powerful in the first place: critical thinking.
AI is not replacing the senior strategist or the creative lead. The new hire. The person who was supposed to learn, grow, and carry the business forward. The one who sat in meetings, asked questions, made mistakes, and learned how this business really works.
At FutureWeek, Sir Martin Sorrell said the learning curve is being flattened. He is right, but not in a good way.
The best leaders I know earned their stripes in the field. They actually built campaigns, fought for budget, navigated chaos, and figured things out by fucking them up. That kind of experience is disappearing. The new path looks cleaner, more efficient, and far more shallow.
We are all generating perfect outputs, but no one can explain why they work. I was at a panel recently where a brand replaced their procurement process with AI making their vendor review cycle lightning-fast. But the proposals they are evaluating were most likely written by AI. Are they choosing the right partner, or just the best response?
We like to say AI has democratised knowledge. That is true. But let’s not pretend it has democratised power. If anything, power is consolidating. C-level leaders are holding on tighter than ever, now with fewer layers beneath them. When someone says they have reduced 80 percent of workflows using AI, I do not doubt it. But I also do not believe all of those workflows were low value.
If you are using AI for 80 percent of your day, so is everyone else. That doesn’t make you more productive. It just makes everyone the same. It becomes a race to the middle.
Remember when email made us reachable 24/7? It felt like a breakthrough. But did it actually make us better? Or just more anxious and reactive?
AI is doing the same thing, only on a much larger scale. It is not just changing how we work. It is changing what work is. It is redefining how we think about value, originality, and truth.
Building ViVV Labs has been a process. I’m glad we didn’t chase content generation tools, audience targeting or easy to replicate productivity agents. We focused on data science. We built for transparency, ethical data, forecasting and performance that actually connects to real outcomes. It is built on heuristics, human-like decision models that reflect how marketing really works. Marketing is irrational. It’s messy and you cannot reduce all of it to a formula, and you can’t prompt your way into instinct.
Too many companies are falling into the trap of thinking they need to build their own AI stack from scratch. I have heard horror stories of teams spending millions building internal systems, only to realise the output was misaligned with the original intent, or already outdated by the time it launched.
Unless you have the budget and a large team to keep pace with the rate of change, the smarter move is often to adopt SaaS technology that is already solving the right problem. Money will be burnt trying to reinvent the wheel.
The companies that will win in this new era aren’t the ones who automate the most. They are the ones who ask better questions, challenge easy answers, scenario plan and focus on impact.
This might be marketing’s self-driving moment. But someone still needs to steer.
