August 26, 2025

S36 Ep2: Deb Andrews - Balancing Human Insight with AI in Marketing

23 minutes

In this week’s episode, Steve sits down with Debra Andrews, president and owner of Marketri. Marketri, a strategic marketing firm. Steve and Deb talk about what goes into creating a marketing plan that the C-suite can get on board with, and Deb shares how she and her team work to balance human knowledge with the speed of artificial intelligence. Deb also explains the role of Marketri’s AI council…

Key Takeaways:

Using key performance measures to show growth toward a goal is integral to getting the C-suite on board with a marketing plan.

To gain trust for AI both inside and outside the organization, transparency is paramount.

AI will shrink marketing teams and marketers will need broader skillsets.

Tune in to hear more about:

How Marketri went about incorporating AI into its operations (6:23)

Deb’s thoughts on the ethics of AI (10:55)

How AI will impact the future of marketing (13:43)

Standout Quotes:

“When we use AI to do the copywriting, we ask it not to supplement with any extra information, only use the information you're given and through that, AI is a wonderful copywriter. It can learn your voice and tone. You can train it on your particular voice and tone, so we can train it on our client's voice and tone. So it can be very customized to that person and how they like to speak, and words they like to use and how they like to sound. But ethically means we're not using trained data in the large language models to produce our content pieces. We're using human brains, their experience, and we're leveraging the tools as copywriters.” - Deb Andrews

“We're not trying to hide that we're using AI and shortcutting the process or delivering something like an AI-produced post. What we share is that we're using it to help them gain competitive advantage, to have the best access to human thinking, our thinking, their thinking as far as their area of subject matter expertise, and then the best of what this technology can do, and it's extremely powerful.” - Deb Andrews

“I think the smaller organizations, they're just struggling to keep afloat of their workload right now. I feel like AI's had this paralyzing effect on a lot of mid-size organizations where they know AI's out there and they know it's supposed to have an impact and they're reading about companies reducing head count and not hiring.” - Deb Andrews

Read the transcript of this episode

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