AI is everywhere right now. Many people are using it. And even more are talking about it.
I don’t know about you, but conversations with industry professionals these days are peppered with “AI-powered this” or “agentic AI that” or some other AI-injected turn of phrase.
There’s a lot of talk, but often not a lot of substance behind it. And that’s not just a claim, we’ve done the numbers on it.
Our colleague Jewels Nistico went to the source and asked AI about how his briefing approach when creating marketing content compared to the majority of AI users, and the answers confirmed what many of us suspected all along.
Here’s the reality – most people use AI as a content generator. Put another way, it’s used as a thinking expander with minimal human input and maximum AI output.
For example, if your AI prompt for marketing content is something like:
“Write a LinkedIn post about leadership” and it comes back with 200 words for you to post, the ratio of words input to words output is around 1:30.
In this case, the AI does the thinking and the human copies the output. It’s efficient and fast, but it’s also shallow.
And it’s so prevalent that we now know this type of content as “AI slop”.
What Jewels discovered when it came to his AI prompts was startlingly different to the above example. He called it thinking compression, where his thoughtful and creative ideas came first, then AI helped to refine and structure his inputs.
To get 200 words of clarity out of AI, Jewels was inputting around 1,200 words of his original thinking. The ratio? 6:1.
If the rising tide of AI lifts all boats, using it uncritically just keeps you level with the rest of the business world. Solid demand generation activity requires originality and clarity.
You need to know:
Who your ICP is
What problems and challenges matter to them
How to engage them
AI can help scale demand gen activities, but it can’t conjure up the creative thinking that drives the messaging.
If your inputs are weak, your outputs will be too. Put another way, rubbish in, rubbish out.
Smart teams are using AI to refine messaging, summarise research, improve structure and accelerate execution.
But the thinking that drives AI still occurs in human brains. AI amplifies good ideas. It doesn’t create them.
And there is a very personal reason why you should think before you prompt.
Your brain is like any other muscle – it gets better with use. When you think and use your brain, you strengthen it and improve your memory. The opposite is also true.
One study found that relying on AI tools like ChatGPT caused participants to “turn their brains off”. When asked to perform a task with AI, then perform it without, participants showed much weaker cognitive activity for the latter task.
And after using AI to write an essay, 83% of ChatGPT users couldn’t accurately quote from their own work just minutes after outputting it.
The message? Use your brain. Don’t fear the blank sheet of paper. Embrace it and fill it before turning to AI to help refine and distil your thinking.
If you’re not up to the task of flipping the thinking/output ratio when using AI, not to worry. That’s what we do for you. We get the balance right, leverage the tools that bring efficiency to the process and, most importantly, bring better ideas and creativity to the table well before a prompt is given to AI.