As AI content creation explodes, invest in trust and differentiation

We’ve crossed the event horizon for AI-generated video. This week’s announcement from Brian Cranston and SAG-Aftra is the start of a long and messy negotiation.

I’m old enough to remember when Napster arrived, breaking down the gates the music and film industry had carefully built over decades. The crisis Napster created wasn’t just economic — it was a breakdown of the relationship and trust between artists and consumers.

My conversations at Dreamforce last week were hopeful. They were tempered, however, with the recognition that so many of us, from actors to musicians to marketers, have to acknowledge — we live in a world where the cost of creating content is quickly falling to zero.

My message to marketing leaders and teams is simple — as content creation accelerates, invest in automating the content work your employees don’t enjoy doing, and focus instead on providing the time and resources they need to expand their creativity and build brand trust with your customers.

What’s happening in the field

A member of my content team shared a link with me this week to a course on reverse engineering winning video ads. Here’s how it works:

• Scour social media for winning UGC ads in your vertical, then download the ones you want to emulate.
• Send the videos to an AI model that can analyze the video shot by shot. Ask it to return a shot-by-shot breakdown in JSON format.
• Take the JSON and ask the model of your choice to take this storyboard and adapt it for your product. Output it in a format optimized for AI tools.
• Paste the prompt, generate the video, then review for accuracy, brand fidelity, legible text, and strong transitions.
• Clean up with free tools that remove watermarks, enhance speech, upscale quality, and strip AI metadata using a video remixer.

To me, this is a perfect example of how not to use AI. It doesn’t build on the work you and your team have done in-house. It intentionally obscures its origins. And it diminishes the importance of humans and trust, which are essential to building a strong brand and relationship with your customers.

Let’s look at some practical examples of how AI and agents can remove the toil work from your employees’ daily routines, allowing them to focus instead on creativity and human connection.

Let’s start with an example of our Sales Kit agent. In the past, a content marketing team would create a blog post, podcast, or whitepaper. It would then take days to convert these assets into materials that were easy for the SDRs and AEs in sales to understand and use with prospects and clients. Instead of spending time on research or creation, they lost it to the necessary but tedious work of versioning and adapting content

No one on the content marketing team is clamoring for more opportunities to translate their work into sales assets. Allowing an agent to handle this work means more time for them to create new, opinionated, well-researched content.

The same is true for sales. In the past, many would take it upon themselves to figure out how to convert content into sales assets if the marketing team didn’t have the bandwidth to help out. With an agent handling the work, reps can stop investing time in areas outside their core skill set — writing copy and graphic design — and focus instead on human interaction and building trust, the most valuable asset in a time when content creation has been accelerated by AI. 

A broader perspective

A good parallel to examine is what’s happening in the world of software development, the function where adoption of AI tools has been the most rapid and widespread. The first workflows that programmers were happy to hand over to AI agents were things like writing tests and documentation.

This is the important but boring busywork that needs to happen for the long-term health of your codebase. When AI receives tasks like these, it leaves developers more time to invest in the creative and challenging work of building new technology, products, and features.

I would compare the work of writing tests and documentation with the work of auditing marketing materials for compliance. In a highly regulated industry, the marketing team might get asked to routinely review thousands of web pages, ebooks, and reports to ensure that it matches with approved product terminology, legal disclaimers, voice guidelines, and claims from your latest messaging framework.

This was the challenge faced by Prudential Financial’s marketing team. We worked closely with them to develop a governance agent that would:

• Crawl a specified list of URLs or a document library
• Compares content against centralized rules: approved product terminology, legal disclaimers, voice guidelines, and claims from your latest messaging framework
• Flags any deviations, such as outdated product names, missing disclaimers, or off-brand tone
• Generates a prioritized report for your marketing ops or compliance team to review, often with suggested fixes

The outcome — brand and legal risks decrease while maintaining the speed and creativity marketing teams need to compete. Prudential’s marketing team increased its speed to market by 70% while boosting their creative team’s capacity by 40%.

The high road or the low road

The rise of AI in marketing presents a fundamental choice. The first path is a race to the bottom — a world flooded with derivative, reverse-engineered content that pollutes the internet and erodes customer trust. It’s a short-term tactic that leads to long-term brand decay.

The second path is a race to the top. It uses AI and agents not as a replacement for creativity, but as a catalyst for it. By automating the repetitive, soul-crushing toil that consumes our teams’ days — converting assets, auditing for compliance, writing basic tests — we don’t just gain efficiency. We reclaim our most valuable resource — time.

This is the true ROI of AI. It’s time to brainstorm a truly original campaign. Time to build relationships with customers face-to-face. Time to develop a sharp, opinionated point of view that cuts through the noise. While AI can generate infinite content, it cannot generate an ounce of trust. That remains a uniquely human endeavor.

As the cost of creation falls to zero, the value of authenticity, creativity, and human connection soars. The brands that will win the next decade are not those who can generate the most content, but those who can generate the most trust. The real question is no longer about what AI can do for us, but what we, as marketers, are prepared to do with the freedom it provides.