I got an email last week from a brand I’ve bought from before. The subject line was personalized, the copy hit all the right beats about solving my problem, and the call-to-action was clear. I should have clicked.

Instead, I deleted it.

Something about it felt hollow. The sentences were too smooth, too perfect, like someone had sanded off every rough edge until there was nothing left to grab onto. No personality, no quirks, no sense that a real person had written it thinking about me specifically.

I couldn’t prove it was AI-generated, but I didn’t need to. It had that telltale sameness, the kind that makes you scroll past without fully registering why.

AI has made marketing faster and more accessible than ever. You can generate a month’s worth of social posts in an hour, draft email campaigns in minutes, and optimize ad copy without hiring a team. The barrier to “good enough” content has essentially disappeared, which means good enough is now everywhere. And when everyone sounds the same, differentiation becomes the real challenge.

At Plum Good Marketing, we use AI intelligently as a lever for speed, iteration, and better decision-making. But we’re crystal clear on one thing: AI is a powerful tool when it’s guided by human strategy, taste, and accountability. Without that, it turns into what a lot of people are calling “AI slop,” the kind of content that dilutes your brand and kills your competitive edge.

The question isn’t whether to use AI. It’s who’s steering.

Why AI Content Strategy Creates a Sameness Problem

AI-generated marketing sounds fine, which is exactly the problem. 

When you prompt ChatGPT or any other AI tool to write an email, a blog post, or social media copy, it’s pulling from the same massive dataset everyone else is using. The output is polished and grammatically correct, but it’s also averaging billions of examples into something that sounds… fine. Professional, inoffensive, and exactly like what your competitors are publishing.

This is where the strategic risk lives. Your brand starts blending into the background noise because nothing about your messaging feels distinct or memorable. Customers can’t tell you apart from three other companies in your space because you’re all using variations of the same phrasing, the same structure, the same “solutions-focused” language that AI loves to generate.

The race to “good enough” content is a race to irrelevance. When everyone can produce decent marketing at scale, decent stops being a competitive advantage. What separates you is specificity, point of view, and the kind of human judgment that knows when to break the rules AI follows religiously.

Brand Voice Consistency with AI: The Human Edge

AI can draft your content, but it can’t decide if that content is right for your brand, your audience, or this specific moment in your business. That requires taste, which is a deeply human skill.

Taste means knowing when the perfectly optimized headline feels too salesy for your audience. It means recognizing that your brand voice should sound conversational without being cutesy, or that this particular email should lead with empathy instead of urgency. AI can’t make those calls because it doesn’t understand context the way a human strategist does.

At Plum, we use AI as a lever for speed and iteration. We’ll use it to generate options, test variations, pull data faster, and automate repetitive tasks that don’t require creative judgment. What we don’t do is hand AI the steering wheel and hope it knows where we’re going.

The differentiator in AI marketing strategy is accountability. Someone needs to own the brand standards, make the strategic tradeoffs, and decide what gets published under your name. A fractional CMO brings that ownership, along with the experience to know when AI is genuinely helpful and when it’s just generating noise that sounds “professional”.

Strategic Use of AI in Marketing That Drives Results

AI becomes powerful when it’s attached to a specific business problem, not deployed because it’s trendy.

One of our clients revised their product descriptions to include more specific technical specs and use cases after we learned that ChatGPT Shopping pulls product data from across the web. Within weeks, they saw an uptick in traffic referred from ChatGPT. The takeaway wasn’t “use AI to write product descriptions.” It was that AI rewards clarity. If your messaging is vague or generic, AI will be vague about you too. If you can clearly articulate what makes your product different and who it’s for, AI can help amplify that.

This is AI search optimization in practice. When you optimize content to be found by AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews, you’re not gaming the system. You’re making your messaging clear, specific, and structured enough that AI can accurately represent what you do. AI SEO optimization rewards brands that can articulate their value proposition without vague marketing speak, because that’s exactly what AI needs to parse, understand, and recommend your business to the right people.

We also use AI to speed up content creation, but only after the human strategy work is done. For one client, we built a comprehensive brand voice document that captured their tone, vocabulary, and messaging principles. Later, when we needed to script a video ad, we used that voice doc to guide AI-generated drafts. The result was faster turnaround without sacrificing the distinct voice that makes their brand recognizable. Clarity compounds, and a strong voice framework is the anti-slop system that keeps AI output from sounding like everyone else.

For an NYC-based client, we connected them with AI developers to explore personalized client outreach and streamline inbound customer service inquiries. The goal wasn’t “let’s use AI because it’s new and fun.” It was solving specific business friction around response time, personalization at scale, and support load. AI handles the repetitive pattern-matching work while humans focus on the nuanced conversations that require empathy and strategic judgment.

Where AI Marketing Leadership Can’t Replace Human Judgment

AI can generate a thousand variations of an email subject line, but it can’t tell you if any of them will make your customers feel seen and understood. That requires empathy, context, and an understanding of human psychology that goes beyond pattern recognition.

We track what we call the “voice note test” as an emotional KPI. That kind of human connection matters more than any dashboard metric, which is why we focus on marketing KPIs that tell the real story alongside the numbers. One client sent us unprompted fan mail via voice note, praising our work on their Reels and email campaigns. You can’t prompt AI to create that kind of connection. Algorithms may change constantly, but human psychology doesn’t. People respond to content that feels like it was made by someone who genuinely gets them, not content that checks all the optimization boxes while missing the soul.

Brand voice is another area where AI needs human guardrails. Without a clear voice framework created by humans who understand your brand’s personality and audience, AI defaults to safe, generic language that could apply to anyone. A strong brand voice document becomes the system that prevents your content from turning into forgettable AI slop, giving AI the boundaries it needs to generate output that sounds distinctly like you.

AI also can’t make nuanced strategic tradeoffs or prioritization decisions. Should you invest in SEO content or paid ads this quarter? Is this campaign worth pulling resources from another initiative? Does this messaging align with where your business is headed? Those decisions require someone who knows your goals, understands your constraints, and can weigh competing priorities with real accountability for the outcomes.

How Fractional CMO AI Strategy Turns Tools Into Outcomes

The difference between AI as a powerful tool and AI as expensive noise comes down to one thing: who owns the strategy.

A fractional CMO bridges high-level thinking and practical implementation. We lead internal teams, manage vendors, make budget decisions, and take real accountability for whether your marketing drives business outcomes. We’re embedded in the work alongside your team, not operating at arm’s length with monthly check-ins.

When you bring in fractional CMO leadership for your AI marketing strategy, you get someone who can evaluate which AI tools solve genuine problems versus which ones are just shiny distractions. We set the brand standards that guide AI output, build the systems that make automation valuable, and own the seat where strategic tradeoffs get made.

This matters because AI doesn’t have judgment about what’s worth your time and budget. It will generate content forever if you let it, but someone needs to decide what’s on-brand, what’s off-strategy, and what’s genuinely moving the business forward versus just creating the appearance of marketing activity.

AI Marketing Strategy That Differentiates

AI has transformed what’s possible in marketing, making it faster and more accessible to create content, analyze data, and automate repetitive work. But speed and accessibility aren’t the same as strategy.

The brands that stand out in an AI-saturated market are the ones using AI as a tool guided by human judgment, taste, and accountability. They’re not outsourcing their brand voice to algorithms or letting AI make strategic decisions. They’re using it strategically to move faster and work smarter while keeping a human at the helm.

If you’re looking for AI marketing leadership that balances efficiency with differentiation, that’s what fractional CMO strategy delivers. We help you figure out where AI creates genuine leverage and where human expertise is non-negotiable. Let’s chat to explore what fractional CMO strategy could look like for your business.