Humans of AI: Presented by WRITER
Humans of AI: Presented by WRITER
The Guardian of Taste: Why slowing down is the ultimate AI strategy with Robert Rose
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We all hit the "skip intro" button. We're conditioned to move faster, ship more, and check another box. But what if speed is the wrong metric to optimize for?
In this episode of Humans of AI, we sit down with Robert Rose, co-founder of the Content Marketing Institute and former Silicon Valley CMO, to discuss AI in marketing — we're using it to train "button pushers" instead of developing craft.
Robert argues that AI is the first technology in 20 years inviting us to slow down, get deeper, and become more creative. He shares his framework for using AI as an "argument room" to pressure-test ideas, why the CMO must become the "guardian of taste," and how to find the valuable friction that differentiates your brand in a sea of AI-generated sameness.
In this episode, we cover:
- Why 30% of a marketer's time is spent configuring tools instead of telling stories
- The danger of "AI theater" and using AI to do more activities without adding value
- How to use AI to pressure-test your thinking and find your blind spots
- Why the CMO's new role is the "guardian of taste"
- How to build quality into your process from the beginning
Listen to the full episode to learn how to stop being a button pusher and start making things that matter.
About the Guest: Robert Rose
Robert Rose has spent 15+ years helping marketing teams figure out what actually matters — and cut the rest. He's the Chief Strategy Advisor at the Content Marketing Institute, founder of consulting firm Seventh Bear, and the author of five books on content and marketing strategy. He's guided over 500 companies, from Salesforce and Adidas to Roche and NASA, on how to build marketing that earns trust rather than just attention.
He co-hosts the This Old Marketing podcast, teaches the official Content Marketing Strategy certification for the American Marketing Association, and is known for one guiding principle — modern marketing shouldn't rely on spammy funnels, soulless automation, or whatever the latest hack is that'll be obsolete by next Tuesday.
In other words, he’s exactly the right person to talk to about what it means to be a marketer when AI can generate infinite content on demand.
Subscribe to Humans of AI for more stories from people navigating the intersection of business and artificial intelligence.
Watch the full video interview on the WRITER YouTube channel for bonus content and deeper insights.
Learn more about WRITER at writer.com.
Hi folks, welcome back to season five of Humans of AI. This season, we're doing something a little different. If you listen to previous episodes, you're probably used to hearing my voice. I'm Alora Weaver, director of Enterprise Content Uwriter. I narrate our stories, helping to make sense of the conversations we're having with leaders across industries. This season, we're going narrow and deep. We're talking exclusively to CMOs and marketing leaders, the people navigating what it actually feels like to transform how work gets done when AI makes everything faster, cheaper, and frankly, a little terrifying. But the technology isn't the hardest part. The people are what's hard. Take the team member too scared to admit they don't know how to use AI, or the creative director wondering if their job still exists in two years. Or the CMO trying to stand out when AI just commoditized everything. This season, the focus shifts to the humans trying to use them, not the tools themselves. The wins, the failures, the three people who quit during the transformation that everyone calls a success story. The messy, uncomfortable middle that nobody puts in the case study. You'll also hear from my boss, Diego Lamanto.
SPEAKER_01I am Diego Lamanto, the chief marketing officer and writer.
SPEAKER_03He's the one sitting down with each guest, and if you want the full unedited conversations, they're all on our YouTube channel. When AI makes everyone faster, how do you differentiate? I hit the skip intro button on everything. Every show. Every time. Sometimes I don't even realize I'm doing it. My thumb just finds that button automatically. And I feel guilty about it. Not because anyone's watching, but because I know someone spent time crafting those opening credits. Someone cares about that 90 seconds I just skipped. But I'm busy, and I want to get to the good part faster. I've been thinking about that a lot lately. This reflex to skip, to speed up, to get through things faster so we can get to the next thing faster. We got AI, and I thought, finally, time to go deeper, time to think harder, time to get better at the craft. But when I'm juggling 10 projects at once, I'm using it to move faster, ship more, check another box. I'm lucky enough to work somewhere that pushes back on that. My boss sees when I'm being spread too thin and encourages me to slow down, focus on craft and quality, and sometimes I can move a deadline if it's not realistic. But most people aren't that lucky. Most people have a boss who just wants it done by Friday. Robert Rose has been watching this for 20 years. He co-founded the Content Marketing Institute, the organization that taught most B2B marketers what content marketing even was. He also spent six years as a CMO in Silicon Valley, sitting through those uncomfortable Friday afternoon pipeline meetings. He knows what we're trying to optimize for. And his newest book says something I've been afraid to admit. Maybe the problem isn't that we're not going fast enough. Maybe we need to slow down. Robert didn't start out wanting to fix marketing. He came to Los Angeles with one goal: to become a rock star. Maybe a screenwriter.
SPEAKER_00The reason I got into content marketing was because I I dislike sales so much. And sort of all I really wanted to do was build cool things. And so content marketing enables me to build cool things for marketing and business.
SPEAKER_03Build cool things. That's what drew him in. That's what content marketing was supposed to be about. But marketing stopped being about building cool things. It became about managing technology, configuring it, learning it, acquiring it.
SPEAKER_00Today's marketer in a large organization spends 30% of their time, 30% of their time either configuring new technology, learning a new technology, or acquiring a new technology. Not spending their time telling stories, reaching out, writing copy, doing the things that are really, you know, sort of the important parts of marketing.
SPEAKER_03That's 12 hours a week spent learning tools instead of doing the work the tools are supposed to enable. Robert tells a story about a director of marketing at a cybersecurity company who ran a HubSpot for the organization, but couldn't tell him anything about the cybersecurity industry itself.
SPEAKER_00I said, tell me about your business, tell me about your competitors, tell me where the industry is right now. And this director of marketing at this organization was like, I don't know anything about it. Like, I don't know anything about this industry. All I do is I'm I run HubSpot for them. That's not good, right?
SPEAKER_03That's not a marketing person. That's a button pusher.
SPEAKER_00We are now training people, young people, to come in and be video game operators. And that's the very thing that AI is designed to replace. And so when we sort of have the conversation of AI replacing marketing people, it it becomes a sort of, yeah, of course they are, because we're training them to ultimately all they do is push buttons.
SPEAKER_03The people we're afraid AI will replace, we train them to do exactly what AI does best: repetitive tasks, following templates, executing without understanding. In the late 90s and early 2000s, when Robert was coming up through B2B marketing, you became entrenched in your business as a subject matter expert. You knew the industry, you knew the competitors, you understood where things were going. People took time to actually teach you how to operate like someone who understood the business. Now marketing degrees have turned into trade schools. Salesforce certified, HubSpot certified, Google certified, and then you graduate, and AI can do all the stuff you just got certified in. So what if we didn't use AI to replace people?
SPEAKER_00If you believe that your marketing team can be do more with less people, in other words, with less people, you can use AI to sort of backfill those people's tasks. You also have to believe the corollary, which is if you had the same or more people, you could actually do more or better work.
SPEAKER_03The companies Robert works with that are actually getting value from AI are not firing people. They're using AI to free their teams to do the core work, the thinking, the strategy, the craft, while AI handles the repetitive stuff. But that only works if your people know how to do the core work. If they can recognize what good looks like.
SPEAKER_00Go get good at the thing you want to get good at so that you understand how AI helps you be better.
SPEAKER_03That's the prerequisite we keep skipping. You can't use AI to become better at something you can't evaluate yourself. The tool is only as good as your ability to recognize when it's giving you garbage versus gold. And that's the trap. We've been moving too fast to get good at anything. Too busy configuring tools to develop craft. And now we're using AI to move even faster. Without stopping to ask, faster toward what? Robert calls it AI theater.
SPEAKER_00In so many cases, what I find is you've got senior leadership, you know, which may come from HR or may come from any other place in the sort of senior levels of the company, which send around your sort of 365 review or whatever employee review you're going to get. And one of the new checkboxes is tell us how AI has actually helped you become more improved, you know, because they're trying to get a narrative that AI helps. And it's like, sure, uh I use Copilot to write a blog post check, right? You know, and it's like they're not actually doing anything useful. They're just doing more activities and sort of experimentation with all this stuff, and there's not really adding any more value.
SPEAKER_03You know what the Content Marketing Institute's research showed? Most of the marketing layoffs happening right now aren't because of AI. Companies overhired during COVID, made bad bets, and now they're using AI as the excuse for cuts they were going to make anyway. And check this out. That's AI theater at the executive level, using AI as cover for decisions that have nothing to do with transformation. And this isn't just a CEO and board level problem. Even CMOs are playing this game, mandating AI transformation for their orgs, but not knowing what actually needs to be transformed.
SPEAKER_00If you ask most CMOs, they have no idea, right? They even to the CMO, marketing is a black box where ideas go in and out the other side comes something that they that they hope is is good and they don't really understand the workflow. So it's like, well, how can you expect a tool like AI to actually improve the process of your operations if you don't understand the operation?
SPEAKER_03That's how most marketing orgs actually run. Ideas go in one end, content comes out the other. Cross your fingers, it's good. That worked, sort of, when humans were navigating the ambiguity. We of course correct, we make judgment calls on the fly. AI can't do that. AI needs a process. It needs to know where the bottlenecks are, where the gaps are, what good actually looks like. Think about every other enterprise technology you've ever implemented. Email, content management systems, analytics, personalization platforms. They're all layers sitting on top of a process, providing scale or effectiveness or efficiency. AI is the same thing. It's a layer, but you can't lay AI on top of a process you don't understand.
SPEAKER_00Find where there are existing bottlenecks, existing gaps, opportunities for effectiveness or efficiency, and start to apply the use cases in those places with that layer. Now all of a sudden you're starting to prove out any use case where it might be efficient, it might be more effective, it might be both.
SPEAKER_03But most AI committees or tiger teams or whatever they're called in your organization, they run off to a lab, do a bunch of experiments, come back with demos that don't actually solve the problems your team faces every day. There's another question we kept circling back to during our conversation. The question that's underneath all of this. Taste. That's the thing AI can't have, can't learn, can't develop. AI is pattern matching, taking what exists and remixing it, creating infinite variations based on everything that came before. What AI can't do is know when something is good enough versus when it's actually good. When to stop, when to say, this is the one. This is worth putting our name on. That's taste. That's judgment. That's the piece we're supposed to be getting better at, while AI handles everything else. But we're not. We're using AI to skip the thinking part to get to the output faster, without asking if the output is worth making.
SPEAKER_00AI is maybe the first technology in 20 years that is quite literally inviting us to slow down, get deeper, become more creative, focus on our craft, and become deeper thinkers. And what are we doing? Our knee-jerk reaction is how does it maybe hack things faster? How does it make me move quicker? How does it help me scale more and create more output?
SPEAKER_03AI is inviting us to slow down, to get deeper, to focus on craft. Robert writes a column every week for the Content Marketing Institute. Before AI, it took him about two hours. Now, it takes him four to six hours. That's not how it's supposed to work. AI is supposed to make you faster. Robert's using AI for something different.
SPEAKER_00The way I use AI, for example, is, you know, the bumper stickery way for me to say it is to everything that AI comes back at me with has a question mark behind it, right? In other words, it's there to help me wrestle with the problem harder and to and to understand things in a more creative way. I have a whole custom AI call that I call the argument room, which is where I go in and have it basically say, assume I'm wrong about this and give me every argument against it. And I sit there and fight and press and look at the research and go look at stuff and verify things, and hopefully my stuff is better because of it.
SPEAKER_03It's Monty Python's argument clinic.
SPEAKER_02Yes, sir. I'd like to have an argument, please. Have you been here before? No, this is my first time. I see. Do you want to have uh the full argument, or were you thinking of taking a course? Well, uh, what would be the course?
SPEAKER_03And it works. His writing is better, his thinking is deeper, but it takes three times longer. That's the friction Robert's book is about. Valuable friction. The kind that makes things better instead of just making them faster. When everyone can generate content at the same speed, speed stops being the differentiator. Quality becomes the differentiator. Having something to say becomes the differentiator.
SPEAKER_00The subtitle of my book is How to Differentiate Yourself in a World Obsessed with Speed. And so it really is ultimately the argument for why to do it is differentiation today. And increasingly, because of the seamlessness of which we can produce content, AI being a big contributor to that, of course, the wall of noise is even higher and more beige than it's ever been.
SPEAKER_03Everyone's optimizing for the same thing: volume, efficiency, scale. So everything starts to blur together. Same tone, same structure, same emptiness. You have to let your personality through, your humanness.
SPEAKER_00My favorite quote of his from his book is where he says, you know, when the work has five mistakes, it's not ready yet. But when it has eight mistakes, it might be.
SPEAKER_03The imperfections are what make it yours, what make it real. Robert told us the story about Netflix's skip intro button.
SPEAKER_00Netflix noticed through their data and their analytics and all the things that they were doing that people were skipping the first five minutes of a show to get right to the content faster. And it was 15% of people. So for them, 15% meant critical mass. So let's develop a feature, right? Let's move fast and develop a feature. And they developed the skip the intro button. Well, why are showrunners and producers of shows still doing lush, beautiful musical themes with Easter eggs in the introduction and sort of introducing the tone? And it's because, as creators, as producers of the content, they care about it. They care about the artistry, they care about that content. They want you to listen to that. They want to thank the people that are on the show. They want to introduce the mood. They want to put you in the right frame of mind for the episode you're about to watch.
SPEAKER_03They care about the experience. They care about putting you in the right frame of mind, even though the data says 15% of people skip it.
SPEAKER_00I have these sense memories of shows like Star Trek and you know the early Warner Brothers cartoons and stuff that I grew up with as a kid, where those theme songs now are in they're etched, not just for the show, but for life stages of my life that I actually associate with those things. Whenever I hear that, I associate with that with a wonderful time in my life. And we're losing that.
SPEAKER_03Those weren't just theme songs. They were bookmarks in his life. Markers for moments and feelings that came rushing back every time he heard those first few notes. They weren't wasted time. They were the experience, not something to skip past to get to the real content. You sand down all the differentiated edges when you optimize everything for speed. You lose the thing that makes it memorable, the thing that makes someone stop and think, this was made by a person who cares. What are we optimizing away? What are we skipping over in the name of speed that actually mattered? What friction are we removing that was adding value? Okay, we know the problem. Infinite mediocrity. Everyone's fast, nobody's different. We know the theory. Have taste, go deeper, use friction to create value. But when you're on a deadline and Demand Gen needs that piece of content by Friday, let's slow down for quality doesn't feel like an option. This is where Diego pointed the conversation. How do you actually justify this as an operating model?
SPEAKER_01I think it has to come from the top. If your CMO is not supporting the quality, no one else will. They're too busy and they just need that piece of content from you. Unless it's the tone is set from the top, like there's visible examples of a leader stopping the team and saying this isn't quality enough or we're not putting this out.
SPEAKER_03It has to come from the top, not from the content team trying to push back on deadlines and getting overruled from the CMO.
SPEAKER_01When I hear you describe the role of the CMO here is you are the guardian of taste, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's exactly it.
SPEAKER_03That's exactly what a CMO is supposed to be these days. The person who looks at the output and says, Does this represent us? Does this have our fingerprints on it? Is this good enough to carry our name?
SPEAKER_01I think we've we've all just had enough experience to know that it doesn't matter if you if you hit the deadline, if it's not good work.
SPEAKER_03That's a hard truth when you're in the middle of the mess trying to ship. But Diego's point was about building the process differently from the start.
SPEAKER_01It's baking in the time to do it right. I'll accept this pushing a deadline once or twice, you know, as we're calibrating and learning how to work together. But we're gonna we can't consistently do that. So it's putting in the right process that leads up to the final date.
SPEAKER_03Bake the time in. Build quality into the process from the beginning. Not pulling the this isn't good enough card at the last minute, but building a workflow that makes space for craft. Map your operation, understand. Where the bottlenecks are. Figure out what good actually looks like for your brand. Then automate around that. Not use AI to go faster and hope quality follows, but define quality first. Then use AI to give you the space to achieve it. Ben Affleck has a quote that Robert loves.
SPEAKER_00He compares AI to being a craftsman where he says a craftsman knows how to build the thing and an artist knows when to stop. Knowing when to stop is valuable friction. And it the stopping may not be until the fourth iteration of something, or it may be after the first. That's agility, not speed, right?
SPEAKER_03That's judgment. That's taste. That's the part that's supposed to be getting more valuable, not less.
SPEAKER_00It's where the team is actually increasing in value rather than becoming a commodity and a bunch of button pushers, right? Where the team is truly a differentiation within the marketing organization and not just a commoditized set of technology managers.
SPEAKER_03Teams that increase in value instead of becoming replaceable. That's what we're trying to build. Work that matters. Brands people actually care about. But you can't get there by being the fastest. You get there by being the one who cares enough to stop and ask, is this actually good? In growth marketing at Writer, we've been preaching this for a while. Productivity is the floor, not the ceiling. Speed is what everyone has now. It's not a sign of excellence anymore. It's table sticks. What differentiates you is the thing you can't automate, your judgment about what's worth making in the first place.
SPEAKER_00Go get good at the thing you want to get good at. Like go get good at strategy, go get good at storytelling, go get good at writing. Because if you can't recognize what good looks like, there's no sense AI will provide zero value to you.
SPEAKER_03So, Monday morning, pull up your content calendar. Look at what you're shipping this week. Pick one thing, just one, and ask yourself if this were the only thing my team produced this month, would it be good enough? Would it represent our best thinking? Would it make someone stop scrolling and actually think differently? If the answer is no, that's your starting point. That's where taste shows up. That's where you stop being a button pusher and start being someone who makes things that matter. Maybe hit the skip intro button a little less often in the shows you watch and in the work you make. Thanks so much, Robert Rose, for sharing your story. This season on Humans of AI, we're asking six questions that no one's asking out loud. What responsibility do we have for the systems we build? How do you transform a team that's afraid of change? How do you stand out when AI makes infinite mediocrity easy? How fast is too fast? What defines your value when AI does what you used to do? And what are we actually building toward? These aren't technology questions, they're people questions. And every marketer we talk to this season, every single one, is asking them right now. They just don't know if anyone else is. This is Humans of AI Season 5. Watch the full interviews on YouTube or listen to the narrative podcast wherever you get your shows. Because the question isn't whether AI is going to change marketing. The question is who are we becoming while it does?
