Disclaimer: This isn’t an AI hate post. AI is amazing. This post is to help you understand where AI rightly falls in the process of creating effective marketing campaigns.
Artificial intelligence is transforming industries at a wild pace. It’s automating workflows and generating content in seconds. Things that used to take hours or days are being done in seconds or minutes. It’s mind-blowing.
While AI is an incredible tool for scaling efficiency, it falls short in one critical area: creating brand messaging that genuinely connects with your audience.
Many businesses are tempted to rely on AI for writing their brand messaging—after all, it can generate text quickly and optimize for keywords.
Here’s the reality: Great messaging isn’t just about speed or data; it’s about human connection, emotional resonance, and compelling storytelling.
Here’s why AI can’t replace the human touch when it comes to brand messaging:
1. AI Lacks Genuine Empathy
Brand messaging isn’t just about stating what your company does—it’s about articulating how you solve real problems for real people. The most effective messaging comes from understanding human emotions, struggles, and aspirations. Sure, AI can analyze data and patterns, but it doesn’t feel—which makes a difference.
For example, an AI can tell you that dental customers value an “affordable and reliable dentist,” but a human strategist can uncover that what they really want is the confidence of a beautiful smile. That nuance is what builds trust and connection.
To position yourself or your business as a trusted guide to your customers, you need to display both authority AND empathy.
Empathy is essentially saying, “I feel your pain,” and meaning it. AI can’t feel.
2. AI Struggles with Storytelling Nuance
People don’t engage with lists of features—they connect with stories.
That’s why successful brand messaging follows a narrative structure: the customer is the hero, and the brand plays the role of the guide, helping them overcome obstacles.
AI-generated content lacks the nuance and emotional depth that make storytelling effective. A great story requires understanding human experiences, recognizing tension points, and delivering a resolution that resonates on an emotional level.
AI can mimic a formula but can’t create genuinely relatable and compelling stories.
3. Creativity Comes from Insight, Not Algorithms
AI is trained on existing data, meaning it generates content based on what’s already been said. While this can be useful for inspiration, true creativity comes from insight, intuition, and lived experience—qualities that AI simply doesn’t possess.
Breakthrough messaging isn’t about repeating what’s already out there; it’s about saying something fresh and uniquely valuable.
AI draws on what is already on the internet…there are a TON of REALLY BAD websites on the internet within your industry. Being different helps you stand out. AI will make you sound like everyone else.
The most compelling brands don’t just communicate what they do—they craft a unique perspective that makes people feel something and take action. That’s a distinctly human skill.
4. AI Is Only As Good As Your Inputs
AI is reactive in its approach to content creation. You create inputs or prompts, and it creates the outputs.
If you provide the wrong inputs, you will get the wrong outputs. As the saying goes, “garbage in, garbage out.”
For example, I worked with a restoration company recently. During the messaging process, they made clear that men were their primary audience. However, when pushed, we uncovered that the people calling them were mostly women. Wives and mothers called most often because they felt the burden of keeping their family safe from mold. So, women were either calling or pressuring their husbands to call.
This discovery drastically changed the messaging and the vibe of our content. Had they just input their existing beliefs about their business into an AI, they would have received ineffective messaging targeted at the wrong audience.
5. Connection Wins Over Perfection
AI-generated content may be grammatically flawless, but perfection doesn’t always equal connection. The most effective messaging feels personal, authentic, and human—not robotic or overly polished.
Think about the brands that resonate most with you. Chances are, they communicate with a voice that feels real and relatable. They tell stories that inspire, use language that sounds like a conversation, and make customers feel like they truly understand their needs. AI struggles to replicate this authenticity because it doesn’t have human experiences from which to draw.
Reality: AI is a Tool, Not a Replacement
AI can be a helpful tool in the messaging process—assisting with brainstorming, summarization, and optimization—but it shouldn’t be the architect of your brand voice. If you want messaging that turns heads, opens wallets, and creates long-term loyalty, you need the human touch.
At the end of the day, people don’t buy from faceless companies. They buy from brands that make them feel seen, understood, and valued. And that’s something only a human can truly deliver.
Human-Created Brand Messaging Makes AI More Powerful
When you get your messaging right, using all the nuance and emotion that come with the human condition, you have the inputs you need to get so much more out of AI-generated content.
As a StoryBrand Guide, I’m a big proponent of the framework. They even released their own AI. You would think it would be sufficient for creating your brand messaging…it’s not.
If you don’t provide StoryBrandAI with the correct inputs, it will still give you a subpar product and create a lot of useless marketing collateral.
However, if you provide it with really strong and well-done messaging, the marketing collateral it creates will be exponentially better.
Bottom Line: AI Informed By Human-Created Brand Messaging Wins
If you take the time to work with a human to create powerful brand messaging that truly resonates with your customers, the sky is the limit with AI.
You’ll be able to create landing pages, email series, social media posts, lead generators, and so much more with AI much quicker and with much more success.
Have you used AI to create content? What did you think?
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