Business leaders are learning to use AI as a tool for repetitive work, not creative thinking—the key is knowing where human judgment is irreplaceable.

What happened

Marketing executives at companies including Liquid Death, athenahealth, Simbe Robotics, and Brex shared their experiences using AI at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference. They described AI as effective for scaling existing ideas, personalizing emails, resizing campaign visuals into hundreds of formats, and automating routine tasks—but ineffective for original creative concepts and strategic ideation.

Why it matters

Dan Murphy at Liquid Death noted that AI-generated marketing often fails to stick with audiences, describing it as 'as forgettable as most AI slop actually is.' His team instead partnered with human artists and comedians to create a bluetooth-enabled urn concept that earned 6 billion earned media impressions with relatively low upfront investment. The executives agree that the real competitive edge comes from deciding which work to delegate to AI and which to protect as 'secret sauce' requiring human taste and judgment.

What to watch

Several leaders described specific productivity wins: one AI personalization customer lifted its email click-through rate by two percentage points, nearly tripling its previous rate. However, the consensus is that using AI well depends on the user's skill and judgment, not the tool itself—two people using identical tools can produce vastly different results.