AI didn’t enter marketing as a strategic partner.
It arrived as a novelty — write a clever prompt, get something back. It was fun, fast, and often impressive.
But it was also shallow.
The “prompt-first” era made it seem like mastery came from the right phrasing.
In reality, it created marketers who depend on trial and error. They spend hours tweaking prompts, comparing outputs, and wondering why the results felt generic. What started as a breakthrough has quickly become a bottleneck.
The truth is prompts aren’t the job. Strategy is.
The marketers pulling ahead now aren’t better at prompting, they’re better at thinking.
They’ve shifted from prompt-first to human-led AI, and it’s changing the quality of their work.
The problem with prompt-first
Prompt-first thinking puts AI in the driver’s seat.
The marketer writes a line of instruction and waits for inspiration to strike.
The result often looks fine — coherent, even polished — but it lacks originality or depth. Anyone can type the same thing and get a similar answer.
When AI leads, the work flattens. Differentiation disappears. The marketer’s role shrinks from strategist to transcriber.
Human-led AI flips that dynamic. You lead with perspective, not prompts.
The marketer frames the problem, defines success, and applies judgment. AI becomes the amplifier, not the architect.
What it looks like in practice
Campaign planning:
Prompt-first: “Write me a campaign plan for a product launch.”
Human-led: You define the positioning, goals, and constraints. AI drafts timelines, creative routes, and risks to test.
Copywriting:
Prompt-first: “Write 5 LinkedIn posts on X.”
Human-led: You decide the angle and audience. AI generates variations that you refine into final messaging.
Analysis:
Prompt-first: “Summarise this data.”
Human-led: You decide what the data is for and what decisions it informs. AI provides summaries and visualisations to accelerate your insight.
Human-led workflows outperform because they combine two strengths: AI’s speed and the marketer’s judgment. The result is content that’s faster, sharper, and uniquely yours.
Try this prompt:
Act as my AI marketing coach. Teach me how to lead you like a strategist, not a prompt writer. Ask me the right questions to clarify my goals, audience, and positioning before we generate anything — and then show me what that changes in the final output.
P.S. This article is taken from the first edition of the Quarterly Playbook. Get the Playbook here →
P.P.S. I’m building The AI Marketers OS — a complete framework for structuring your context, playbooks, and systems so you can scale this model across your entire marketing workflow. Join the waitlist here →
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