AI Marketing Tools Are Just Expensive Excuses

Every few months, a new AI marketing tool promises to “revolutionise your workflow.”
It won’t.

It’ll probably just make you feel busy again. Which is the same thing most founders crave when they’ve run out of conviction. Movement feels like progress, especially when it comes with a shiny dashboard and a lifetime deal.

I’ve used almost all of them. Some out of curiosity, some out of masochism. Half of them start by asking you to “input your brand voice,” which is their polite way of saying, please write the copy you want me to plagiarise back to you later.

That’s the loop. You feed it ideas, it spits them back, you polish them, and you convince yourself you’ve done strategy.

You haven’t.

The illusion of progress

There’s a certain irony in watching everyone automate the one part of business that’s supposed to be personal.
Marketing isn’t the act of reaching people. It’s the process of proving you understand them.
AI, for all its brilliance, doesn’t understand anything. It just predicts the next plausible sentence.

And yet here we are — founders, marketers, ex-agency nomads — sitting at the altar of the next shiny thing, typing “write me a marketing plan for my SaaS” like it’s a prayer.

It’s not that AI can’t help. It can.
But tools are scaffolding, not structures.

What most people call “AI marketing” is really “AI-assisted procrastination.”

When tools replace thinking

When I built LiftKit, it wasn’t because I thought the world needed another ChatGPT workflow.
It was because every founder I met was treating AI like a vending machine: insert keyword, receive copy.
No system, no sequencing, no understanding of why things worked when they did.

The difference between leverage and laziness is intent.
Most tools don’t teach you intent — they sell you templates.

Templates are comfort.
Comfort kills insight.

If you’ve ever spent a full afternoon testing prompts, you know what I mean. That slow slide into madness where you start thinking, maybe the problem is my wording. It’s not. The problem is you’re asking a machine to think for you when you haven’t decided what you actually think yet.

That’s not automation. That’s avoidance dressed in productivity metrics.

The leverage delusion

Every founder wants leverage. Nobody wants to earn it.

Leverage doesn’t come from finding the right AI stack; it comes from making better decisions with the ones you already have.
But that’s boring. Nobody writes blog posts about “doing fewer things correctly.”

So instead, we chase the dopamine loop.
We build “AI ecosystems.”
We brag about how many zaps we’ve automated.
And then we wake up three months later wondering why engagement hasn’t moved.

The truth is simple and uncomfortable: your funnel isn’t broken because you lack tools. It’s broken because your story doesn’t make sense.

And AI can’t fix a story it doesn’t understand.

The real job of AI marketing tools

Every now and then, someone will DM me:

“Hey, which AI marketing tools do you recommend?”

I tell them the same thing every time.
Use whichever one you already know how to think through.

Because the bottleneck isn’t the model. It’s the operator.

Give the same prompt to ten marketers, and nine will produce mediocrity that sounds like ambition. The tenth will sound like conviction — because they actually have some.

That’s the game. Tools don’t make you sharp. They just amplify what’s already there.

So if your inputs are fuzzy, your outputs will be expensive garbage — faster.

The system behind the tools

The real edge isn’t knowing which AI tools to use. It’s knowing what question to ask them.

Most founders think they’re one prompt away from enlightenment. But the only real upgrade is your own clarity.

That’s why I wrote LiftKit the way I did — not as a manual for ChatGPT, but as a way to install a thinking pattern. The prompts aren’t just instructions; they’re mirrors. They force you to articulate logic before you generate language.

Because when you can explain your positioning in plain English, everything else — copy, content, funnel — becomes execution, not guesswork.

That’s the part nobody tells you: the reason Fortune 100 companies pay consultants millions isn’t for creativity. It’s for certainty.

AI can’t give you that. But a structured brain can.

The circular insanity of the internet

The funniest part about all this is how circular it’s become.
People use AI tools to write blog posts about which AI tools to use.
LinkedIn is just one long self-referential hallucination now.

The internet used to feel like an experiment.
Now it feels like a simulation being A/B tested to death.

Every post sounds like someone who just discovered what a “funnel” is.
Every product sounds like it was named by an algorithm trained on venture decks.

And somehow, amidst all that noise, the rarest thing left online is a founder with an original opinion.

The paradox of AI marketing tools

They make it easier to create, harder to stand out.
You can automate output, but you can’t automate taste.

And taste is what makes people trust you.

So when you see another shiny “AI-powered growth engine,” ask yourself:
Are you buying leverage, or are you outsourcing conviction?

Because the latter is just ego wrapped in software.

The uncomfortable truth

If there’s a point to any of this, it’s probably this:
AI isn’t here to replace you. It’s here to expose you.

Expose the gaps in your reasoning. The laziness in your strategy. The lack of systems behind your ambitions.

If you can’t make sense of what you’re selling, no tool will rescue you from that.

But if you can — if you’ve done the real work of thinking — AI becomes a multiplier, not a mask.

That’s why I still believe in it.
Not as salvation, but as acceleration.

And if you ever want to see what that looks like in practice — how AI can think like a strategist instead of a stenographer — you’ll probably find it in LiftKit.

It’s not a tool. It’s a way to make every other tool finally make sense.

Key Takeaways

If you skimmed, here’s the truth:
AI tools don’t save time. They reveal how little thinking you’ve done.
Automation without clarity is chaos.
The future belongs to those who use AI to refine thought, not replace it.