One of our biggest competitors isn’t another marketing agency… it’s AI.
We actually collaborate pretty frequently with other marketers and creatives, especially when supporting a larger project, because marketing and communications is a massive umbrella and we all bring something different to the table. A great designer, videographer, PR professional, and strategist bring expertise that makes the work better. We don’t look at those people and think, “They’re replacing what we do.”
AI is different. For small business owners especially, it has created a very reasonable question: If AI can write my social posts, give me a marketing plan, create images, and tell me what I should be doing, why do I need to hire a marketer?
We think the answer requires us to separate the ability to produce marketing materials from the ability to market a business effectively.
Here at It Matters, we use AI regularly in our own work and we’re extremely transparent with all of my clients when and where we apply it. It has made certain parts of the job significantly faster, and we don’t think marketers should pretend otherwise. AI can help with research, organize large amounts of information, analyze data, explore ideas, summarize documents, and balance blind spots or argue for other perspectives. Used well, it gives marketers more time to focus on the work that requires human strategy and judgment.
But what we see more and more of is expecting the tool to replace the person who understands what you’re trying to build, who you’re trying to reach, and why any of it should matter to them.
Consumers Can Feel When Something Is Missing
Canva’s 2026 State of Marketing & AI research, conducted in partnership with The Harris Poll, surveyed 1,415 marketing leaders and 3,547 consumers across seven countries. The results paint an interesting picture because consumers aren’t necessarily outright rejecting AI, but they are still interested in human involvement in the process.
78% said they would rather see advertisements made by people, even if AI could produce better ones, and 87% believe the best advertising still requires a human touch. Perhaps the most interesting finding was that 70% of consumers said they can usually recognize AI-generated advertising because it feels like something is missing.
At IMM, we think that “something” is worth paying attention to.
Marketing is ultimately about understanding people well enough to create a connection between what they need and what a business has to offer. That requires more than knowing their age, location, search behavior, or demographic profile. It requires understanding what frustrates them, what motivates them, what makes them skeptical, what earns their trust, and why they might choose one business over another.
AI can process information about those things, but processing information and understanding context aren’t always the same thing.
People Still Want to Buy From People
This becomes especially important for small businesses because the people behind the business are often one of its greatest competitive advantages.
A customer isn’t simply choosing between two logos. They might be choosing a contractor they will invite into their home, a massage therapist they trust with their comfort, a consultant they are going to share sensitive business problems with, or a nonprofit they trust to use their donation responsibly. In businesses like these, the person delivering the service and the relationship a customer develops with that person are part of the product.
That is difficult to replicate through increasingly generic content.
Canva’s research found that 69% of Gen Z and Millennial consumers are comfortable with AI involvement in advertising as long as real people are featured. That distinction matters because consumers aren’t necessarily telling businesses to stop using AI, they’re telling us that they still want to see the humans behind the businesses asking for their attention, trust, and money.
For a small business, hiding those people behind perfectly polished AI-generated content can actually remove one of the things that makes the business worth choosing in the first place.
Creative Work Is Still Human Work
One of the biggest misconceptions about AI in marketing is that generating something and creating something are the same thing. They aren’t.
AI can produce a headline, an image, a social media post, or an email in seconds, but speed doesn’t make the idea original, insightful, or meaningful. AI is working from information and patterns that already exist. It doesn’t sit across the table from a business owner and hear the story behind why they started their company. It doesn’t notice the hesitation in a customer’s voice, understand an inside joke within a community, or have the lived experience that makes someone recognize when an idea will resonate with another person.
Those things matter because good creative work doesn’t begin with the question, “What should we post?” It begins much earlier with questions about what a business stands for, what its customers actually care about, what makes it different, and what idea will make someone stop long enough to pay attention.
That is where human creativity and judgment become difficult to replace. The marketer isn’t simply there to review what AI produces and choose the best option. The marketer brings the strategy, perspective, curiosity, experience, and original thinking that gives the creative work a reason to exist in the first place.
Canva’s 2026 research suggests marketing leaders see that distinction as well. 42% said AI will never fully replicate empathy and emotional intelligence, while 41% pointed to the human imperfection that creates originality and another 41% identified brand intuition and creative judgment.
It can help organize thoughts, work through information, or make certain parts of production more efficient. However, we don’t want the tool deciding what our clients should say, what they should stand for, or what will make their customers care. Those are marketing decisions, not AI prompts.
Trust Is Everything
For small businesses in particular, trust may be one of the most valuable things a brand has, and it can take years to build while requiring only a few bad interactions to damage.
This is another reason I believe strongly in keeping a human in the loop when using AI for marketing.
AI can confidently provide incorrect information, misunderstand context, create something inconsistent with a brand’s values, or produce content that sounds polished while saying very little. It can also generate content that looks and sounds remarkably similar to what every other business using the same tools is producing.
The ability to create more content faster doesn’t necessarily solve that problem. In some cases, it makes it worse because businesses now have the ability to create more bad content, just faster.
Canva found that 41% of marketing leaders already consider low-quality “AI slop” a real challenge. That number doesn’t surprise us. As the barrier to producing content continues to fall, judgment becomes even more important because somebody still needs to determine what deserves to represent the brand.
Keeping a human in the loop doesn’t mean a person needs to manually perform every task that AI can assist with. It means a person remains accountable for the strategy, accuracy, creative direction, and decisions behind the work.
AI Is a Tool, So Treat It Like One
We think about AI a little like a hammer. A hammer is an incredibly valuable tool, but owning one doesn’t make someone a carpenter.
Put a hammer in the hands of someone who knows how to build a house, and it helps that person do the job more efficiently. Give someone the same hammer without any understanding of construction, and they might still manage to build something, but there is also a decent chance they are going to hit themselves in the thumb and give up halfway through.
AI isn’t all that different. Having access to a marketing tool doesn’t automatically give someone an understanding of marketing strategy, just as having access to Canva didn’t suddenly make everyone a graphic designer and having a smartphone camera didn’t make everyone a professional photographer. The tools lower the barrier to creating something, but expertise determines whether what gets created actually accomplishes the goal.
That is why we don’t believe the answer is choosing between AI and humans.
Canva found that 89% of marketing leaders say AI saves them time, while 99% plan to increase their investment in AI in 2026. Those numbers make it clear that AI is going to remain a significant part of marketing, and we really do think that’s a good thing. There are plenty of tasks that AI can help us accomplish faster and, in some specific cases, better.
The opportunity is learning where AI adds value and where human judgment still matters. We aim to keep a knowledgeable human in the driver’s seat who understands the business, the customer, and the strategy well enough to know what to do with everything the tool produces.
Because producing more marketing has never been the goal. Creating marketing that makes people trust you, remember you, and ultimately choose you is. AI can help us get there, but knowing how to get there still matters.
Source: Canva, State of Marketing & AI Report 2026, research conducted in partnership with The Harris Poll.