The AI Fox Hole
All Those Free Tools Cost More Than You Think
It happened back in the day with social media marketing and it’s happening again with AI. So many clients believed that social media, and now that AI, especially tools like ChatGPT, mean they can get marketing related work instantly and pretty much for free. The idea is seductive: copy, strategy, even design at the push of a prompt.
But then there’s reality: AI isn’t free. It’s invisi-labour, and that unintended, unadvertised labour cost left unidentified will land squarely on your agency’s bottom line if you’re snoozing.
AI-generated content often requires serious clean-up. Brand voice alignment, fact-checking, ideation quality, tone sensitivity, these things don’t magically appear with a prompt.
What feels like a shortcut to clients becomes a massive time suck for agencies. And the levels of waste in the pursuit of perfection can be incredible. Often we see attempts to circumvent the creative process, to skirt experience, turn a blind eye to design training, or a knowledge of design history. All of this experience is where the real value lies now, it can be made available to ensure inexperienced prompting doesn’t lead your client into a social which can be embarrassing, or worse, a design faux-pas that leads to brand litigation hurting careers, client and agency reputations as well as bank accounts.
This is where leadership matters.
Agencies must be prepared to:
Demystify AI for clients, explaining its capabilities and limitations.
Build clear boundaries around what’s included in scope.
Introduce AI not as a replacement, but as a side-kick that still needs an experienced human with creative sensibilities at the controls.
Avoid digging yourself down a foxhole of endless and sometimes impossible to execute rework. Be proactive, be transparent, and be clear about the true cost of "free" tools.
