MOBI’s marketing lead Liz Cherry has raised concerns that marketers may be “half accepting as normal” the growing sameness of AI-generated campaign language, as brands increasingly rely on the same tools to scale content production.
Speaking to B&T about the rapid adoption of AI in marketing, during the HubSpot Grow 2026 conference in Sydney on Tuesday, Cherry said while the shift has been transformative, it’s been just as disorienting.
“As a marketer, I use a lot of different AI tools,” she admitted. “The power I see from them is incredible. I can improve campaign metrics, I can increase the number of campaigns I do. Everything is just faster, which is what we’re all seeing.”
The AI-driven restaurant and hospitality technology platform uses AI to improve operations and customer experiences by enabling voice-enabled ordering, personal recommendations, and automated menu management, which Cherry says improves efficiency in high-volume environments while reducing reliance on manual staff input.
However, Cherry told B&T the speed of AI has become “one of the biggest stress points for the industry”.
“I think the pace is probably the most daunting thing marketers are feeling right now with AI,” Cherry said. “Things are moving so quickly. On one hand, it’s great because we can test and learn quickly, but on the other, when we look at competitors, it can feel really overwhelming – like you’re being outpaced or outrun.”
While she is a strong advocate for AI efficiency, Cherry warned that widespread adoption is already starting to impact creative differentiation.
“We are noticing that brands using AI are often using similar platforms,” she said. “And in return, sometimes their work starts to look quite similar.”
She said this is becoming “increasingly obvious to audiences.”
“You read something or see an ad and you think, ‘Yeah, AI wrote that,’” Cherry said. “People are very attuned to it now.”
What’s the big question for marketers?
“Do we half accept it as normal?” she told B&T. “That things are going to start sounding a bit the same?”
Cherry said there is a risk that efficiency could come at the cost of distinctiveness, particularly for brands without strong identity foundations.
“If you don’t have a really clear tone of voice and a strong sense of what your brand stands for, it’s easy for everything to become homogenous,” she said.
However, she argued that AI should not be seen as the enemy of creativity, but rather a tool to remove friction from it.
“If AI can take away the mundane stuff — the admin, the repetitive posting, the operational work — then it actually gives marketers more space to be creative,” she said.
Still, she cautioned against over-reliance.
“We’re professionals at the end of the day. We’re experts in our trade,” Cherry said. “If you lean too heavily on AI without that experience, you can end up doing the same thing as everyone else.”
Why it all depends on the right balance
For Cherry, the future of marketing will depend on balance.
“It’s about knowing where AI fits and where humans are essential,” she said. “The brands that get this right will be the ones that stay distinctive – not the ones that just move the fastest.”
However, Cherry said AI is already proving highly valuable in her own workflow when used correctly, particularly in removing repetitive tasks and freeing up time for strategic thinking.
She said one of the most effective uses of AI is eliminating low-value, repetitive work.
“My biggest advice is: find the job you hate doing the most, and then figure out how AI can do it for you,” she said.
Cherry pointed to social media management as an example.
“I used to post organic social content three, four, five times a week. It would take hours every week — and it was just eating into everything else I needed to do,” she said. “As a single marketer, that just wasn’t sustainable.”
AI handling the draft process, rather than the final product
Cherry said AI handles now handles much of the drafting process.
“I spend about 10 minutes reviewing what AI has written and I literally just hit publish,” Cherry said. “It takes away that feeling of dread, that ‘I have to do this task again’ feeling, and gives you back time to think.”
That reclaimed time, she said, has changed how she approaches her role.
“It opens up so much more opportunity to think about what’s next, to do better competitive analysis, to look at what competitors are doing and how we can do it better,” she said. “You can try new things instead of just keeping up with the backlog.”
Cherry also described building what she called an “AI marketing coordinator” within her workflow.
“I’ve got an AI agent that essentially acts like a marketing coordinator,” she said. “I give it a brief, it finds the information, writes it, and in some cases even helps publish it.”
“It’s doing so much of the heavy lifting.”
Where should marketers normalise using AI?
Cherry believes words like copy “can still be written by AI.”
“However, if it’s a leading campaign that you’re investing a lot of money in it, I would still use a professional copywriter to be doing that work for you,” she said.
“It’s really knowing where to lean on humans and where to lean on AI. And in our organisation, we find it when we know what our humans are best at. So what is your human best at?”
She said those that “have the luxury of having a copywriter in-house should use them”.
“They are the experts,” she said. “They are humans. They will know what humans love to hear.”
“If you are like me, and you have very little resources, you need to use what the team is great at best, and then supplement the rest with AI.”
