Colin Fleming, Chief Marketing Officer for Business at OpenAI, noted that generative AI has dramatically closed the gap between conceptualizing an idea and testing its market effectiveness.
As artificial intelligence rapidly transforms how marketing teams develop ideas, build campaigns, and make strategic decisions, it is introducing a new dilemma for modern brands: determining which projects actually warrant production.
With AI tools now enabling marketing and sales teams to build prototypes and deploy campaigns independently—bypassing traditional specialist bottlenecks, extended approval cycles, and extra production budgets—the barrier to execution has virtually disappeared, shifting the core challenge from campaign creation to editorial discipline.
Fleming’s position, however, comes with an important warning. While AI can accelerate production, it can also make it easier for organisations to produce large volumes of work that is technically competent but strategically undifferentiated.
He argues that quality must remain the defining standard, noting that if a company’s work could carry a competitor’s logo without changing its meaning, then the work has failed to create meaningful differentiation.
The development is forcing marketing organisations to reconsider their traditional role. Rather than controlling access to marketing production, Fleming believes marketing leaders should increasingly focus on establishing the standards that determine what should reach customers.
The rapid reduction in production costs could also remove an unintended constraint that previously helped companies maintain consistency.
Historically, the cost and resources required to produce campaigns meant that organisations often reused established visual systems, messaging and creative assets. Ideas that required too much time or money frequently disappeared during internal resource discussions before reaching customers.
With AI making production faster and cheaper, that natural filter is weakening.
As a result, marketers may face an overwhelming volume of work that is affordable, fast to produce and technically acceptable. The challenge will therefore shift from creating more content to deciding what not to create.
This could increase the importance of editorial leadership within marketing departments, with senior figures potentially required to reject work that does not strengthen a company’s broader brand strategy.
Synthetic Audiences Raise New Questions
Another emerging issue is the use of AI-generated or synthetic audiences to test marketing messages.
Fleming reportedly noted that OpenAI is testing synthetic audiences based on real customer research, including using a synthetic CMO to review his own article. While such tools could help marketers pressure-test messaging before committing significant resources, their effectiveness depends heavily on the quality of the original customer research.
Synthetic audiences may struggle to identify fundamental flaws in an idea because their responses are ultimately shaped by the information provided to the model.
Real customers, by contrast, can introduce unexpected reactions, misunderstandings and objections that organisations may not have anticipated. That friction, although slower and more expensive, can reveal problems that internal teams and AI systems might overlook.
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Marketing Is Spreading Across Organisations
The growing accessibility of AI is also blurring traditional departmental boundaries.
Fleming cited OpenAI research indicating that marketing-related tasks appeared frequently in the work of employees outside marketing, with salespeople reportedly sending more ChatGPT messages about marketing than sales.
The development suggests that storytelling, campaign development and other traditionally specialised marketing activities are becoming accessible across organisations.
However, this creates another challenge for marketing professionals. As AI makes the more easily describable aspects of marketing available to everyone, the value of experienced marketers may increasingly lie in customer understanding, strategic judgment, differentiation and the ability to recognise when an organisation is moving in the wrong direction.
AI Is Changing How Buyers Discover Brands
Perhaps the most significant implication is emerging beyond marketing production itself: AI is becoming part of the buyer’s decision-making process.
Instead of relying exclusively on company websites, advertising, trade publications and search engines, buyers can increasingly ask AI systems to compare companies, products and vendors.
This means brands must consider not only what they publish but also how they are represented across the information sources that AI models use to generate recommendations.
The result is a new dimension of brand management. Companies must establish clear, specific and consistent positions across their websites, independent coverage and customer experiences.
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