AI replacing marketers?

There is a version of AI-assisted marketing that works.

You scope a task tightly, give it a clear input, evaluate the output against something measurable, and keep a human in the loop on anything where a wrong answer compounds.

Several tools have built real businesses doing exactly this, but Okara is trying to do something different.

On March 16, they launched what they called the world's first AI CMO.

Enter your website URL and six agents handle your SEO, content, Reddit, Twitter, and GEO, for $99 a month.

Their claim is that it replaced CXOs' paid top tier salary and came with a lot of experience.

The SEO panel showed twelve checks: title tag confirmed, H1 present, meta description within character limits. Mostly things Google Search Console gives you for free.

Then the tweets.

The first called a prospective student a psychopath for cold-emailing alumni and searching for syllabi online, which is crazy.

The second was a promotional post for Okara, written in Masters' Union's voice, asking our own audience to be impressed that we had hired an AI CMO.

The agent was running Okara's marketing through our account.

It had no mechanism to know that Masters' Union needs to earn trust from students making a significant financial and professional decision.

That kind of context accumulates through months of being inside an organisation, understanding what the brand has promised, and knowing who is in the room when decisions get made.

The agent optimised for engagement because engagement was the signal it could read.

Trust was not legible to it.

A human marketer who had spent a week with the brand would have known the register was wrong before writing a single word.

Jasper AI hit $80 million in revenue in 2022 and raised $125 million at a $1.5 billion valuation.

Then ChatGPT launched.

By 2024, revenue had fallen by more than half and both co-founders had stepped down.

The tools that collapsed were the ones that promised to remove human judgment from the loop.

Persado optimises language for large enterprise clients and claims its outputs beat human copy 96% of the time.

It did not claim to replace a CMO. It required trained marketers to set the direction and interpret the results.

The difference here is the scope of the task.

Crawling a site, finding technical errors, and flagging pages with thin content - all have a clear input, a measurable output, and a fast feedback loop.

The agent does not need to understand your brand to tell you that a page has a 404 error.

The human decides what to do with that information.

The moment you try to hand over the judgment about what the information means and what the brand should do with it, you are removing the part of the work that protects the brand.

Even if the outputs had been better, he would still have spent considerable time editing them into something usable. At that point you might as well start from scratch.

Coca-Cola's AI-generated holiday ad was called soulless. Toys R Us debuted the first brand film made with OpenAI's Sora at Cannes Lions and positive sentiment fell from 12% to 3%.

Last week on Twitter, someone posted a screenshot of an email from the founder of Composio explaining it had been sent by his AI agent.

The replies were not kind.

What the founder read as efficient, the audience read as the founder not thinking they were worth his time.

This is the cost of skipping judgment, empathy and connection which leads to brand distrust (almost infidelity for loyal customers).

Reddit moderators can usually tell when a post is promotional and AI-generated and Hacker News has rejected marketing copy for years.

The audiences most attuned to AI content are also the ones most likely to become your first users.

AI slop was named word of the year in 2025. Once a phrase like that catches on, it sticks

I understand the positioning but I have a problem with who they are targeting.

A solo founder at the pre-PMF stage is still finding their first hundred users and still testing whether the product solves a real problem.

That person does not need a CMO, AI or otherwise.

SEO takes four to six weeks to index, and that assumes you already know what you are optimising for and GEO assumes people are searching for your category.

A Reddit strategy assumes there are communities where your potential users are having honest conversations about your problem.

All of this is downstream of knowing who your customer is and why they would buy from you.

That work gets done through conversations. An agent cannot substitute for those conversations at the early stage.

It can only perform activity that looks like marketing while the actual work of understanding your customer goes undone.

The judgment you are trying to skip at the start is the judgment you will need for every decision that follows.

Okara's own best marketing was a single provocative tweet written by a human that received over 13 million impressions.

The product that promises to handle your Twitter presence launched itself with exactly the kind of content its agents could not produce.

That tells you everything.

Reply and tell me what you have tried, and what came back.

Nandini

PS: The junior displacement numbers, employment for people aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed roles down 13 to 16% since late 2022, are a separate conversation, but they are downstream of the same dynamic.