AI Won’t Save Your Marketing (But Being Human Might)
29 June 2026
A Digital Dispatch by Sian Jamieson, Partnership Lead
There is always a slightly terrifying moment when someone steps on stage and starts talking about your area of expertise. Especially when the topic is marketing and AI.
You sit there waiting to find out whether the last year of your professional thinking is about to be confirmed… or completely dismantled.
Thankfully, during Monika Dimitrova’s WordCamp Europe session, AI Won’t Save Your Marketing, But It Might Save Your Time and Money, my main note to myself was: “Validated my marketing. Phew.” (Closely followed by several enthusiastic scribbles and too many exclamation marks.)
Because what Monika talked about wasn’t really an AI problem, it was a marketing problem we already had. AI has just made it much more obvious.
There were a few themes from her session that really stayed with me, not because they were brand new ideas, but because they put words to something I think a lot of people working in digital communications are feeling right now.
If everyone suddenly has access to the same tools, the same prompts and the same ability to create more content, what actually makes your organisation stand out?
For me, it came back to five things: knowing your audience, understanding your own voice, having clear values, sharing real experiences and being brave enough to have an opinion.
TL;DR AI won’t save your marketing
- Escape the “Age of Beige”: AI often leads to “perfectly fine” yet generic output; to stand out, organizations must avoid the trap of uninspired, automated content.
- Pass the “Logo Test”: A simple test for brand authenticity: remove your name and logo from your marketing, could it belong to any other charity or agency?
- Prioritize Real Personas: Understand real-world frustrations and the language of your audience, rather than generic AI assumptions or superficial marketing demographics.
- AI Requires Human “Ingredients”: AI tools are only as effective as the data you feed them; providing specific “knowledge blocks”is essential for useful output.
- Reclaim Your Opinion: In an automated landscape, having a clear position and genuine beliefs makes an organization memorable and builds deeper trust with the right people.
1. Welcome to the age of perfectly fine content
For years, marketers have been chasing more. More blogs, social posts, emails, channels. And now AI has arrived and said “Great news. We can do more.”
But should we?
The challenge isn’t whether AI can help us create content because it absolutely can. The challenge is whether anyone will remember it.
AI is brilliant at recognising patterns. It can look at thousands of examples of what “good” looks like and produce something polished, structured and sensible.
The problem? Everyone else has access to the same “sensible”.
And this is when the internet starts to feel a little bit “beige”, as Monika described it.
2. The question every organisation should ask
One of my favourite takeaways from Monika’s talk was a beautifully simple test: Remove your name and logo from your marketing, could someone else have written it? Could it belong to another charity? Another agency? Another organisation in your sector?
If the answer is yes, the problem probably isn’t your writing, it’s that you’ve lost yourself somewhere along the way.
And that’s something AI can’t fix for you.
3. AI doesn’t know your people
One thing I was very happy to hear Monika talk about was audience personas, because I love a persona.
Not the “Sarah, 42, likes coffee and uses Instagram” kind, but the useful kind… Built on actual conversations, from the questions people ask on calls, the little frustrations they mention halfway through a project, from the sentence that starts with: “This is probably silly, but…”
Spoiler: that sentence almost always leads to something important.
Because people rarely describe their problems in neat marketing language. Nobody wakes up thinking: “I need a scalable digital transformation solution.” They think:
“Our spreadsheet is terrifying.”
“Our website doesn’t represent us anymore.”
“We spend hours doing this manually and there must be a better way.”
That is where good communication starts, with the real.
4. AI needs ingredients
Something I’ve found myself talking about more and more is that AI is only as useful as what you feed it. Ask it a generic question and you’ll probably get a generic answer.
Because it doesn’t magically know who you are, what you value, how your audience feels, what you’ve learned over 15 years, what hill you’re willing to (politely) stand on.
That information has to come from you.
At Pooka, we’ve started thinking about these as knowledge blocks. The foundations AI needs before it can actually help: your voice, audience, values, experience and opinions.
Without those, AI is guessing. With those, it becomes something much more useful, not the person doing your thinking, but the person sitting across the table asking better questions.
5. The return of having an opinion
This was probably my favourite part of the whole talk, because somewhere along the way, marketing got very good at sounding professional, and sometimes very bad at sounding like actual people.
But the things that make organisations memorable are usually the things they genuinely believe. Not controversial hot takes or arguing online for attention. But just having a position.
For us, that means: we believe open source technology matters.
We believe good digital tools should make people’s lives easier.
We believe accessibility and privacy should be built in from the beginning.
We believe relationships matter more than transactions.
Not everyone will care about those things, and that’s okay, because the right people will.
Less noise. More meaning.
AI is not going away, and honestly, I wouldn’t want it to. Used well, it gives small teams access to tools and possibilities that simply didn’t exist a few years ago. That’s exciting.
But if we only use it to create more of what already exists, we’re missing the opportunity. The organisations that stand out won’t necessarily be the ones producing the most content, they’ll be the ones brave enough to sound like themselves.
So maybe the next big digital skill isn’t learning how to sound more like AI, maybe it’s remembering how to sound more like you.
A huge thank you to Monika for putting into words what so many of us are navigating right now, how we embrace AI without losing the things that make our work (and our organisations) meaningful.
Her full WordCamp Europe 2026 talk, “AI Won’t Save Your Marketing, But It Might Save Your Time and Money”, is well worth your next coffee break.
Watch it here 👇
About Monika and SiteGround
Monika has spent over 17 years working in technology, helping build, market and grow WordPress and web hosting products. For the past decade she has worked at SiteGround, where she leads work across growth marketing and business development, alongside supporting the development and adoption of AI tools within the company.
SiteGround is a global web hosting company and long-standing contributor within the WordPress community, providing hosting solutions and tools that help individuals, businesses and organisations build and manage their websites.
What made Monika’s WordCamp Europe 2026 talk particularly interesting was that her perspective wasn’t anti-AI. As someone actively working with AI products and training teams to use AI effectively, her message was instead about using these tools thoughtfully, combining their efficiency with the context, creativity and understanding that only real people can bring.
AI isn’t the strategy. It’s the tool.
The real work is understanding your audience, finding your voice and knowing what you stand for. Once those foundations are in place, AI becomes far more useful.
If you’d like to explore how your organisation can use AI more confidently, responsibly and ethically, whether that’s for content creation, marketing, social media or digital communications, I’d love to help.
Get in touch to arrange a practical conversations about what will genuinely work for your team.
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