My View on Using AI in Your Meta Ads and Marketing in May 2026

In this episode of Abundant Funnels, Jayne shares her honest and measured perspective on AI in Meta™ Ads and marketing. She talks about where she sees AI being genuinely useful, where she thinks it can create problems and why she believes human expertise, judgment and oversight still matter just as much as ever.

Jayne covers stories she is hearing inside the industry about agencies running accounts heavily through AI, her thoughts on Russell Brunson replacing his copywriting and social media teams with AI, and why she would not make that choice in her own business. She also explains how she personally uses AI to organise ideas and increase output, why generic AI-generated ad copy usually falls flat, the story behind her own tool Lily LeadGen and why she is taking a cautious, considered approach to newer integrations like the Claude x Meta™ connector.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why Jayne believes AI should support marketers, not replace them.
• What can go wrong when AI is used with too little human oversight.
• Her perspective on Russell Brunson replacing copywriters with AI.
• How she uses AI in her own business and ad copy process.
• Why generic AI prompts usually create weak Meta™ Ads.
• Why Lily LeadGen exists and how it is different from a general AI tool.
• Why she is being cautious with the Claude x Meta™ connector.
• What a balanced, quality-first approach to AI in marketing can look like.

Connect with Jayne:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/webonize

Website: https://webonize.com.au/

FREE Resource - The Facebook™ Ads
$3 Lead Formula: https://learn.webonize.com.au/leadformula

Join Abundant Ads Academy: https://courses.webonize.com.au/abundantadsacademy

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

I'm Jane Day and welcome to Abundant Funnels. I help coaches, course creators, and online experts get high-quality leads and consistent sales without relying on guesswork, constant content creation, or $10 leads. In fact, I'm known for getting some of the best cost per lead results for quality buyers in the industry. This show is where we break down the ad strategy, the funnel, and the numbers so you can grow your revenue and buy back your time in a way that's actually sustainable. Let's get started. Hi there and welcome back to the podcast. Today I want to talk about something that is absolutely everywhere in the online business world right now, and that is AI. Specifically, I want to share my thoughts on using AI in your meta ads and your broader marketing. Because there is a lot of noise out there on this topic. Some people treating AI like it's going to replace every human in marketing, and others refusing to touch it at all. And as usual, I think the truth sits somewhere in the middle. But I want to be upfront from the start. I am not an AI expert. I'm not going to sit here and tell you I'm doing all kinds of advanced things with it in my business because I'm not. I'm using it for the bare basics. But what I do know, after 14 years of running ad campaigns and managing client accounts every single day, I know what good marketing looks and feels like. And that perspective shapes everything I'm about to share with you. I've been hearing more and more stories from inside the industry about agencies that have let go of the majority of their staff and are now running client ad accounts almost entirely through AI automated, minimal human oversight. And this does concern me on so many levels. I'll give you a real example. I've seen ads come through recently through on my own feed from a business I know is running their ads and marketing heavily through AI. I've heard them speak about it on their own podcast. And the ads that I saw that came through on my feed had their terms and conditions, the copy showing up in their ad text. So obviously incorrect text in the ad copy, incorrect image sizing in the wrong placement. Basic errors that any human reviewer would have caught in two seconds. Now I do want to be fair here, errors happen. Even with experienced human teams, things slip through. And right now in Ads Manager, Meta is constantly changing defaults on us. You make a setting and Meta quietly shifts it before you hit publish. It is genuinely hard to keep up with, which is exactly why ads need to be triple checked by human eyes before they ever go live. Not just reviewed, triple checked. When AI is running the show with minimal human oversight, those checks don't happen. And the result is ads going live that reflect poorly on the business, waste money, and simply don't perform. You may have seen the news recently about Russell Brunson, the founder of ClickFunnels and one of the original figures in the online marketing world. He announced that he has fired his entire copywriting and social media teams. He claims all of his copy is now being produced by AI, saving him over $650,000 a year in the process. And look, I do understand the business logic here. On paper, those numbers are attractive. $650,000 in a year in savings. But in my honest opinion, it's a risk I wouldn't take. And here's why. Great copy, the kind that actually converts, isn't just technically correct sentences put together in the right order. It has creative nuance. It has emotional depth. It finds angles that are unexpected and fresh. It reflects a specific voice of a brand in a way that feels real and human to the person reading it. And those things evolve. Your messaging doesn't stay the same forever. Your insights and beliefs change. Your audience changes. The market changes. The conversation your ideal client is having in their head shifts over time. And keeping up with that, I believe, requires a human who is constantly researching, observing, and adapting. Not an AI that was trained on a snapshot of what worked at a particular point in time. AI can produce copy quickly, but in my opinion, relying on it solely leads to a loss of the creative nuance, emotional depth, and those unique angles that make marketing actually work. And that loss I believe will compound over time. So now let me tell you what I do use AI for, because I absolutely do use it and it generally makes my work faster and more efficient. But as I said before, I know I'm I'm not even scratching the surface of what it can do for my business. The biggest thing at the moment I use it for is pulling my ideas together. And this podcast is actually a great example of that. Every week I know what I want to talk about. I have the ideas, the opinions, the real client stories, the knowledge from 14 years in the industry. What AI helps me do is take all of that, sometimes what I describe as verbal diarrhea of my thoughts on a topic, and AI will help shape it into something cohesive that actually makes sense for a listener to follow. The ideas are mine, the expertise is mine. AI just helps me organize and present it clearly. I do the same thing with ad copy for clients. I have a very specific framework for how I want ads written depending on the campaign objective. I know what the hook, the problem, and the offer is. I know who the audience is, what the brand voice is, what the messaging angles are. I feed all of that in and AI helps me produce the volume of variation that Meta now requires with our ads. Because Meta needs so much more creative variety from us than it ever has before, more ad options, more angles, more formats, AI genuinely helps with the output side of that increased demand. But, and this is really important, you have to know what to tell it, you have to know what good output looks like, and you have to be able to identify what will actually convert and what won't. If you just open up Claude or Chat GPT and say, write me some Facebook ads, you are going to get what I'd call and what's commonly known as AI slop. Generic, flat copy that has no specific angle, no real emotional pull, and no understanding of your audience. It will not perform, not in any meaningful way. The quality of AI output is entirely dependent on the quality of what you put into it and the knowledge of the person directing it. Because I work so closely with meta ads every day, I actually built my own AI tool specifically for writing lead generation ads. It's called Lily LeadGen and it's built on my frameworks and trained what I know is currently working in ads. The reason I built it rather than just using a general AI tool is exactly what I just said. General AI doesn't know my methodology. It doesn't know the specific formula I use for LeadGen ads. It doesn't know what's performing well in 2026 versus what was working 12-18 months ago. Lily does, because I trained her on it. And I continue to update and retrain her as the platform evolves and as I learn what's working across client accounts. That ongoing human input, the research, the knowledge base, the constant refinement is what makes the tool genuinely useful rather than just a content generator. If you're interested, Lily Lee Gen is available for $27 currently and the link is in the show notes. I also want to touch on something that's come up recently, the Claude connector that can now be used with Meta Ads. For anyone who doesn't know, this is essentially an integration that allows Claude to interact directly with your ad account. And I want to be honest with you, I am not jumping into this straight away for a few reasons. The first is security. My clients' ad accounts are of the highest importance to me. Integrity and security of those accounts is non-negotiable. And introducing any new integration, even a Meta-approved one, is something I want to take my time evaluating before I recommend it or use it myself. The second reason is that just two months ago, Meta was actively flagging and shutting down accounts that were detected using AI integration with their ad accounts. It happened to me personally twice in a matter of weeks. When I was personally uploading ads for clients, I wasn't using any AI. My account was paused and I had to complete a video verification, turning my face different angles so that Meta could confirm that I was actually a human sitting behind the screen. I also heard of other businesses having their accounts deactivated entirely with no pathway to appeal or review because they were using AI tools with their accounts. Yes, the Claude Connector is an officially approved Meta integration. That does change the picture somewhat. But I like to make these decisions measured. I'm not an earlier adapter when it comes to anything that touches the security of my clients' accounts and even my own ad account. I will watch, I will learn, and I will make an informed decision when I have enough evidence that it is safe and beneficial to do so. And I believe that that is a right approach for most business owners too. Not a flat no forever, but a considered informed yes when the time is right. So let's just summarize everything I've discussed today. AI has a genuine and useful place in your marketing, including your meta ads. It can speed up your output, help you manage the increased volume of creative that Meta now requires for our ads. And it also assists with pulling together ideas and copy when you are directing it well. But I believe it is not a replacement for human expertise, human judgment, or human oversight. The businesses that will win with AI are not the ones who hand everything over to it. They're the ones who know their craft well enough to direct AI effectively, review its output critically, and continue developing the knowledge that makes the AI useful in the first place. And absolutely, I know how I use AI will change over time. There is no way to avoid it. It will probably change in four weeks' time. I'm continuing to learn and develop how I use AI in my own business over time. I'm not rushing, I'm not chasing every new tool or trend, but I'm focusing on quality in my marketing, in my clients' results, and in everything I put out there. And as I said, I know this will continue to evolve. So I plan to do an updated episode on AI and the role it plays with meta ads and my business in the next few months. Let's see how much that actually does evolve. If you want to get a feel of how I've currently built AI into my ad copy process specifically, check out Lily Lee Jen in the show notes. And if you want to build out your whole meta ads strategy with me right beside you, Abundant Ads Academy is where we do that work together. The link is in the show notes for that as well. Thank you so much for tuning in today, and I'll see you in the next episode of Abundant Funnels.