The Year AI Entered the Marketing Room: My Take on 2023’s Most Consequential Shift
At the beginning of 2023, most marketing leaders I knew had a vague awareness of AI tools and a lingering sense that they should probably pay more attention. By the end of the year, there wasn’t a single marketing team I knew that wasn’t actively using AI for something — and a growing number had restructured workflows, headcount, and budgets around it.
That’s a faster adoption curve than mobile. Faster than social. Possibly faster than any technology shift the industry has ever seen. And I think most of the marketing profession still hasn’t fully processed what happened.
What Actually Changed in 2023
The technology that drove this shift wasn’t new in 2023. Large language models had been developing for years. But the combination of ChatGPT’s accessibility, Midjourney’s visual capabilities, and a wave of marketing-specific tools built on these foundations created a tipping point. Suddenly, AI wasn’t a research project. It was a production tool.
Content that previously took a day to produce could be drafted in an hour. Social copy that required a copywriter could be generated in seconds. Images that required a designer could be created from a text prompt. The efficiency implications were immediate and significant — and the implications for the human roles that supported these functions were uncomfortable to confront.
What the Smart Brands Got Right
The marketing organizations that navigated AI well in 2023 treated it as a force multiplier, not a replacement. They used it to accelerate the parts of the creative process that were genuinely mechanical — first drafts, variations, research, ideation — and they reinvested the time savings into the parts that require genuine human judgment: strategy, voice, positioning, relationship.
The brands that stumbled tried to use AI to replace judgment rather than augment it. Their AI-generated content was generic. Their AI-produced images were uncanny. Their AI-optimized email sequences were efficient but lifeless. The result was content that technically checked boxes without creating any of the human connection that makes marketing actually work.
The GEO Implication Nobody Was Talking About
Here’s the shift most brands were too busy implementing AI tools to notice: the AI systems generating all this content are also the AI systems that users are increasingly asking for information. The same technology that’s helping you write content faster is also determining whether your brand appears in AI-generated search results.
This is the GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — challenge. Your content isn’t just competing for human attention anymore. It’s competing to inform the AI systems that are increasingly mediating how people discover information. The brands that understood this in 2023 started building content strategies optimized for AI citation, not just search ranking. The ones that didn’t are going to spend 2024 catching up.
2023 was the year AI moved from the future into the room. The brands that responded well treated it as the most powerful creative and operational tool they’d ever had. The ones that responded poorly let it replace the judgment that made their marketing worth anything.
Steve Wolf
Steve Wolf is a C-suite marketing executive and growth strategist. He serves as CMO of Pinnacle Global Network and CEO of Aquaphant.
