AI won't fix your marketing - but it might finally show you what's broken

Every sector I have worked in has had its version of the same conversation over the past two years. Financial services, healthcare, travel technology, gaming, consumer. Different industries, different boardrooms, different language.

But the same underlying question: what do we do about AI?

And in almost every case, the conversation starts in the wrong place.

Businesses are asking "how do we use AI in our marketing?" when the question they should be asking is "do we understand our audience well enough for AI to actually help us?"

Because here is the thing that most of the breathless coverage about AI in marketing consistently misses. AI is a multiplier. It takes what you already know about your audience and makes it faster, sharper and more scalable. But if what you know about your audience is shallow, incomplete or just plain wrong, AI will scale that too. Faster, at greater volume, and at significantly higher cost.

Garbage in, garbage out has never been more relevant than it is right now.

What I have seen across sectors

When I was building the data capability at Just Group, we were not thinking about AI in the way businesses talk about it today. But we were doing the foundational work that AI now depends on, building a genuine understanding of who our audience was, what drove their decisions, where they were in their journey, and what would move them to act. We built the enterprise data platform, the CRM and the marketing automation engine. Not because the technology was interesting, but because you cannot market precisely to people you do not understand precisely.

At Travelport I implemented a data management platform across a global business spanning 11 languages. The social listening, the audience segmentation, the attribution modelling. Again, the point was never the technology. The point was what the technology allowed us to understand about the people on the other side of our marketing.

What I have observed across every sector since is that the businesses making the most of AI in their marketing are not necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated AI tools. They are the ones with the strongest underlying audience insight. The AI is just making that insight work harder.

The sectors getting this wrong

Financial services is still largely using AI to automate what it was already doing badly. Sending more emails faster. Personalising based on product held rather than genuine behavioural understanding. Triggering journeys based on transaction data without any real sense of what the customer actually needs at that moment in their life.

Healthcare marketing is using AI to generate content at scale without stopping to ask whether the content is reaching the right person at the right moment in the right way. Volume is not the same as relevance.

And across almost every sector, businesses are investing in AI-powered personalisation tools before they have solved the more fundamental problem: they do not have a single, coherent, trusted view of their customer. The AI sits on top of fragmented, inconsistent, incomplete data and produces fragmented, inconsistent, incomplete results.

What AI actually does well

Used properly, AI is transformative for audience understanding. Not for replacing it.

The ability to process behavioural signals at a scale no human team could manage. The ability to identify patterns in how different audience segments move through a journey and what nudges them forward. The ability to test messaging variations across segments simultaneously and learn what lands and what doesn't. The ability to predict which customers are most likely to convert, churn, or be receptive to a new proposition, and act on that prediction in real time.

These are genuinely powerful capabilities. But they all depend on the same foundation. You have to know who you are talking to. You have to have the data infrastructure to capture meaningful signals. And you have to have the strategic clarity to know what you are trying to learn and why.

AI without audience understanding is just expensive noise delivered at speed.

The question every sector needs to answer first

Before any business in any sector invests further in AI marketing tools, there is one question worth sitting with honestly: if we removed the AI tomorrow, would we still know enough about our audience to market to them effectively?

If the answer is yes, then AI will genuinely accelerate what you are doing. It will help you do it faster, more precisely, and at greater scale.

If the answer is no, or not really, then AI is not your next investment. Audience understanding is. Build that first. Get the data foundations right. Develop a genuine, evidence-based picture of who your customer is, what they care about, and what moves them. Then apply AI to make that understanding work harder.

The businesses that will win with AI over the next five years are not the ones that adopted it earliest. They are the ones who had the discipline to build the right foundations before they did.

Every sector I have worked in has taught me a version of the same lesson. The technology is never the hard part. Understanding the people is. AI does not change that. It just makes it more expensive to get wrong.

Gareth Foster is the founder of crowd. — fractional CMO and marketing leadership built on the principle that great marketing follows the audience, not the industry. If this resonated with where your business is right now, let's talk.