A student in one of my AI classes asked me a question I wasn’t expecting.
We were in the middle of a GenAI class when they stopped me and asked: if AI can generate content in five seconds, why are we spending years learning this? What’s the point?
I hear the worry in their voice. What will life be like for them when they graduate? I worry for them too.
I didn’t have a slick answer ready. Because honestly — it’s a fair question. One I’ve asked myself.
This is what I shared, even though we don’t have all the answers, even though we are educators and facilitators:
I’m a writer and a marketer. Those are my strengths. So when AI came along, I made a decision: I would use it to make me more efficient at what I already do well. Not to replace my thinking. To protect my time so I can do more of it.
I can’t draw. If you asked me for a visual, you’d get a very awkward-looking stick figure. You can ask my ex-colleagues – every time I draw something, they aren’t sure if it’s a spaceship or a new floor plan for an event. So for anything design-related, I hire someone who can actually do it. Because a human illustrator brings something AI-generated art cannot — a unique perspective, a one-of-a-kind result, something that wasn’t just assembled from existing data.
The same is true for project management. AI is coming for reporting, status updates, and scheduling. That’s fine, I didn’t like those parts either. But you cannot automate walking into a room where a project is falling apart, reading six different people’s stress levels simultaneously, and saying exactly the right thing to make everyone believe you’ll still make the deadline. I’ve done that, and I have faith that no AI can replicate that yet.
The same logic applies to writing and strategy. AI can produce a decent first draft. It cannot produce twenty years of industry judgment. It cannot read the room in a client meeting. It cannot build the relationship that makes someone call you instead of someone else. This is a question about AI and marketing careers that more people are asking than ever before.
But here’s the part I also said out loud, because I think it needed to be said.
Yes. AI is taking jobs. Yes, clients now send me AI copy and ask me to edit it, rather than brief me to write from scratch. I’ve had to adapt. I can’t just refuse and hope the industry reverses course. What is my dog going to eat if I just refused?
So I made a choice about how to use it. One I can sleep with.
I don’t use it to replace people. I use it to replace the tasks that were quietly stealing my best thinking. The copy-pasting. The reformatting. The repetitive scheduling. The things that weren’t hard were just endless.
And what came back in its place was something I hadn’t had in a while. Some mental space for actual ideation. For new ideas. (I have a couple of new ideas brewing ALREADY!) For the work that only a human can do.
Someone at a conference I attended said something that stuck with me: “If someone is selling you an AI solution that will last forever, they’re scamming you.” Nobody knows what’s coming next. The speed of change is relentless.
What we can control is how we position ourselves inside that change.
I shared with the class: Don’t just learn AI instead of your craft. Learn it alongside your craft. Because the people who will be fine are the ones who bring both to the table. The human judgment and the tool fluency.
That’s the only answer I have. And so far, I can still sleep at night.