The AI paradox in marketing: fascination, resistance, and reinvention
Artificial intelligence has moved rapidly from experimentation to the center of business strategy. In marketing, its promise is both alluring and disruptive: automating content creation, optimizing campaigns in real time, personalizing customer relationships, and unlocking predictive insights from vast streams of data.
Yet alongside this fascination runs a current of hesitation. A recent study by Al Moosa and colleagues (2025) explores how marketing professionals themselves make sense of this paradox.
Listening to professionals
The researchers conducted in-depth interviews with 24 experienced marketers from Africa, Europe, the United States, and the Gulf region. The conversations revealed not just how AI is being used, but how it is felt. Rather than neat acceptance curves, the findings describe a spectrum of attitudes, ranging from enthusiastic embrace to skepticism and ambivalence.
AI as support and amplifier
Many participants spoke of AI as a companion that relieves pressure. By taking over repetitive or time-consuming tasks, the technology was described as a form of psychological support, a way to handle workload without sacrificing creativity or strategic focus.
Several professionals recounted how AI tools helped them generate images, manage SEO, or optimize ad placements in real time. The technology was not imagined as a replacement for human skill, but as an amplifier — a tool that “lets me do my work without being overwhelmed,” as one interviewee put it.
Anxiety and ambivalence
Others voiced concern about what is lost when machines step into creative territory. Some worried that technical expertise, once central to their craft, risks being diluted if “anyone can manage a campaign” with the help of AI.
A recurring theme was the absence of emotional or cultural nuance: while algorithms can generate content at scale, they may falter when subtle human understanding is required. This ambivalence often came through in careful reflections: AI can be powerful, yet its fit depends on personal style, organizational context, and the specificities of the market.
Where AI finds its place
The study also mapped the spaces where AI has already found footing. Automated content generation, from blog posts and emails to images and even augmented reality experiences, is widespread.
Advertising optimization was another dominant theme, with participants describing how algorithms adjust bids, targeting, and creative elements in real time.
Customer relationship management surfaced as a fertile ground, where chatbots and predictive analytics help anticipate needs and extend service beyond office hours.
Beyond benefits and barriers
Interviewees returned again and again to the question of what AI means for their own professional identity. The researchers found that benefits and barriers cannot be separated neatly.
Alongside efficiency gains come anxieties about job displacement. Alongside personalization comes unease about privacy and bias. And alongside speed and scale comes the challenge of cultural adaptation, particularly in emerging markets where data cultures are uneven.
The future of the profession
Looking forward, the interviewees imagined a profession reshaped rather than replaced. AI will take over more of the mechanical tasks, but human judgment, creativity, and cultural sensitivity remain decisive. New skills are emerging at the intersection of the two: prompt engineering, data analysis, ethical reasoning, and the ability to evaluate algorithmic output critically. The future of marketing, in their view, will be defined by collaboration between human and machine, not competition.
A paradox still unfolding
The study concludes that AI in marketing cannot be reduced to a story of smooth acceptance or outright resistance. It is, instead, a paradoxical process where fascination and hesitation coexist. For organizations, this means that adoption strategies must move beyond technical training to address identity, ethics, and cultural fit. For researchers, it underscores the need to expand theoretical models to capture the complexity of how professionals actually live with AI.
In short, the arrival of AI in marketing is not just a technological shift. It is also a reconfiguration of what it means to be a marketer, one negotiated daily at the intersection of efficiency, creativity, and professional pride.
