The Autonomous Marketer: AI Will Make You Better, Not Replace You

In July, OpenAI announced the launch of ChatGPT Agents, a new unified agentic system that allows ChatGPT to “do work for you using its own computer, handling complex tasks from start to finish.”

Think: generating recurring weekly metrics reports or rearranging meetings on your calendar or even booking a team off-site.

In other words? The work of an assistant — or in today’s digitally-connected world — a virtual assistant (VA).

Seasoned VA and CEO and Director of Calm at Don't Panic Management (DPM) Jess Tyson’s first reaction to this news was 😬😳🤔— probably pretty similar to how you feel as a marketer learning to work alongside AI technology.

After all, the rapid adoption of AI over the past few years has been exciting, but has also instilled a not-so-unrealistic level of worry for those whose job tasks AI can seemingly handle — like marketers and VAs.

Ultimately, though, this announcement didn’t come as a huge surprise to Jess. After more than a decade in the VA business, Jess is no stranger to technology shifts and has weathered many changes in the industry over the years. Instead of fearing this new technology, Jess and her team of VAs are harnessing AI’s power to make themselves even more irreplaceable to their clients.

Here’s what smart marketers can learn from this forward-thinking VA business. It’s the Autonomous Marketing approach — embracing new technology while highlighting our primary strength: human connection.

Jess can’t even remember the first time she really took notice of AI because the truth is, early forms of AI have been built into many of the tools she’s used for her VA work for years and years.

“With Google, there’s predictive text. There’s Siri. We’ve used Grammarly for as long as I can remember — at least 10 years —  and there’s AI built into that,” she explains. “It wasn’t that I didn't realize it was AI, but I didn't really think about it as something that was particularly impacting us in any meaningful way. It was helping us when we needed it, but we weren't actively seeking ways to use it.”

When you think about it, we’ve been using AI in marketing tools in a similar fashion for years, likely without giving the technology much thought.

So that’s the good news: you’re already doing this — now it’s time to level up.

While AI was a natural part of Jess’s tech stack and workflow prior to ChatGPT’s boom in 2022, it has certainly become difficult to ignore as it has become so much more prevalent in tools the DPM team already used, let alone all the new tools that have since been introduced.

“That’s when we realized we needed to be able to answer questions when clients came to us wondering why they should hire us instead of just using ChatGPT,” Jess shares.

This is probably a question you’ve asked yourself — or maybe even been asked by a client or company leadership when it comes to marketing strategies and tactics.

“It’s obvious to me, but we had to be able to explain to prospective clients how we’re using the tools to help us be more productive." At this point, we do not believe AI can replace us,” Jess says.

Like many, Jess approaches AI with a healthy dose of realism: AI offers fantastic tools that can help VAs and marketers be way more effective and productive — but it’s not the end-all, be-all, and requires a careful human eye to reach its fullest potential.

And when it comes to new advances like ChatGPT Agents, Jess says, “It's both scary and exciting to see this. I think it was a natural progression for someone to take, leading AI to be more proactive rather than reactive.”

But still, Jess cautions that marketers and assistants remember the true value — the human touch — they bring to a company or client: creativity and critical thinking.

“That's what scares me a little bit, is some people who are truly going all in are turning a part of their brain off and assuming that AI is going to take over for them. It's not — it's just not there yet, and it might be eventually, but it's our job as assistants, entrepreneurs, and marketers to use our critical thinking and to be more discerning than ever,” she says.

And that basically boils down Jess’s take on AI: It’s an incredibly helpful set of tools when paired with a smart human at the helm directing it.

Jess is right: AI makes you better, not replaceable. The Autonomous Marketer shows you exactly how to amplify your skills with AI—delivered every other week, no fluff.

Sign up for the newsletter now →

Here are the various ways Jess and her team use AI to impress clients, be more productive, and create more room for creativity. Many of these clever use cases also apply to busy marketers looking to save time completing research, writing, and more.

• For content ideation: “AI is great for helping to generate ideas for new topics for content. As AI became more popular, we decided we wanted to start writing more blog posts on the topic for the DPM website. I used AI to help me generate a list of ideas to write about.”
• For getting started on a new project: “Google NotebookLM helps us distill lots of information and documents into an easier way to understand big ideas when starting with a new client or beginning a new project.”
• For design: “Canva's AI has been great to help us start new projects for blog graphics, event invites, and social media graphics, along with Squarespace AI for website building.”
• For social media: “Descript helps us create social media clips from the most important elements of podcast recordings, including captions, as well as transcripts and highlight reels.

• For project management: “AI is baked into a lot of project management tools we use, like Asana, that can help you actually plan out projects. So you’re able to say, ‘I have this media campaign I'm working on. I need the first ad to go out on this date. Can you help me create a project timeline for this and help me set up subtasks and due dates?’ It's so great for creating the skeleton of a project and for timeline generation. Similarly, ClickUp has a newer tool called ‘Standup,’ where it will summarize what you worked on over the last seven days, which is useful during team meetings as we go over what we got done and what we need to focus on next. This is a written summary and also has clickable projects/tasks within the summary.”
• For cutting down project time: “AI helps us research and connect the dots a lot faster. Just the other day, someone asked me to set up a Zap to put an email address into a specific campaign. ChatGPT wrote out the steps I needed to take so I didn’t have to spend 20 minutes researching how to do it myself.”
• For cleaning up writing: “What's really cool about the new technology in AI is when we first started using Grammarly, it was solely a grammar checker. Now you can prompt it to help you fine-tune your own writing in the voice of X or based on context from Y.  This is helping us hone in, and be sensitive to whoever the audience is that's reading this email, blog post, newsletter, or whatever it is.”

• For audience and market research: “AI can help us learn more about the audiences we're trying to reach. If you're a brand new business owner or running a new marketing campaign for your client to research, you can ask AI questions like: How do other businesses in this industry communicate? Or what kinds of drip campaigns did they do? What are some ideas for a lead magnet? What kinds of questions are my customers asking?”

The result of the Don’t Panic Management team using AI for client work? A whole lot of time savings. While Jess doesn’t use AI for every work-related task, when she does, it saves serious time and energy.

“I would say AI saves me about 75% of the time I’d usually spend on a task. Like, if something was going to take me an hour of research without AI, it might take me 15 minutes using ChatGPT,” she shares.

That time savings is invaluable for marketers looking to delegate repetitive or tedious tasks to free up time and brain space for deeper work. 

Looking forward, Jess thinks she’ll be able to tell clients that AI is actually maximizing the time and money they invest into DPM’s work.

“We’ll be able to say ‘you're paying for five hours a week of our time, but you're really getting more like seven or eight because we're using the AI to support us in that five hours.’” Jess says they’re not quite there yet, but expects in the future to be able to tell clients they’re getting double the amount of time they’re paying for, thanks to AI.

At the end of the day, Jess believes we need to take an optimistic view of all the ways AI and autonomous marketing can help us do our jobs even better and more efficiently.

“Abundance mindset,” she says. “We can get a lot more done in a lot less time now, allowing us to have more space and time in our days to think about the best ways to do things, to have bright ideas, and to truly make ourselves valuable, as opposed to being so stuck in the weeds with limitless tasks and paper pushing,” she says.

Jess believes autonomous marketing can help save a lot of time and brainpower, and enable marketers, VAs, and business owners to adapt and pivot more quickly.

“My hope and dream for this era is that we find a way to work alongside the AI, but that we don't get stuck in a productivity trap. More isn't always more. We need to lean on the power that AI provides, but not replace it with other menial tasks,” Jess explains. “I believe, if used properly, AI support will allow us the space and time to have more big ideas, come up with more strategic solutions, and really move the needle to making big changes in the world.”