By Jo van Vuuren — Fractional CMO
The disclosure first: this website was built with AI. Claude wrote the first draft of much of the code behind it and a fair share of the sentences on it. The Galley’s site was built the same way. So was the Ashbrook Foundation’s. I say so in the case studies, and I’m saying it here, because a good part of my industry is currently pretending otherwise.
Here is what the tools are for. A charity’s brand and website went from nothing to live in six weeks, without the five-figure development bill that would once have made it impossible. A restaurant owner updates his own menus by voice, and no developer invoices him for it. Drafts that used to take a fortnight of agency back-and-forth arrive in an afternoon. That is not a gimmick. For a small business, it is the difference between marketing that happens and marketing that stays on the someday list.
So when I say the thinking wasn’t AI, I don’t mean I typed every word. I mean the decisions. That The Galley’s problem was being found and booked, not the food. That GTI needed its category named before it needed a website. That a college’s marketing problem was really an admissions problem. Which client claims we can stand behind in public, which numbers stay private, and what a page should refuse to say. No model made any of those calls, because they aren’t language problems. They are judgement, taste and twenty years of watching what happens next.
The failure mode is everywhere now, and it isn’t the tool’s fault. Ask a model for a service page with no decisions attached and you get the same page everyone else got: polished, plausible, interchangeable. An unspecified brief produces the median, and every median sounds identical. The giveaway on those sites was never the vocabulary. It is the absence of anyone having decided anything.
I’ll be honest about the balance of my own days. Sometimes the draft comes back better than I would have written it. More often it comes back confident, wrong in ways a client would fire me for, and the whole job is knowing which is which. That filter is not in the subscription. It is somebody who knows the client, the market and the numbers, accepting and rejecting with a reason each time.
Run this page through an AI detector if you like. The words may pass or they may not; detectors guess. The judgements are mine either way, and they are the thing you would be hiring.
If you want this working arrangement for your own business (the speed without the median) it is a service: AI, Marketing & Technology. The sober version of this argument is in using AI in marketing safely, and the industry-scale question in will AI replace marketing agencies?
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