Why Staying Human Is the New Competitive Advantage
The world’s best chess players just taught us all something we didn’t expect to learn about AI.
Elite grandmasters have spent the last few years using AI to memorize perfect opening sequences, sometimes 20 or more moves deep. The result? Both sides show up to the board with the same preparation, the same precision, the same flawless opening theory. And when everyone plays the optimal move, the games end in draws. Lots of them…
So the grandmasters have started doing something counterintuitive. They began deliberately playing suboptimal moves, moves the AI would rate as inferior, specifically to drag their opponents into unfamiliar territory where raw human judgment matters more than memorized perfection.
Marketing best practices are similar. In a world where every marketer has access to the same AI tools, benchmark studies, and optimization playbooks, the moves are all memorized. Which means the differentiated play might be the one the algorithm wouldn’t recommend.
This isn’t an argument against AI. I use AI every day, and I’ve built my company around helping businesses use it well. It’s an argument for knowing which game you’re actually playing, and choosing your moves accordingly. In my opinion, it starts with the human first.
The Rulebook Everyone Memorized
Here’s the thing about best practices: they become best practices because they worked. Then everyone copies them. Then they stop working as well. Then someone writes a blog post with a new best practice, and the cycle continues.
By now, everyone knows you should post consistently, optimize your subject lines, A/B test everything, let the algorithm decide, boost posts, run ads, and hit your benchmarks.
These aren’t bad ideas. They’re just memorized moves everyone is playing, and it is ending in a lot of draws. No differentiation and no strategic advantage. The only way to be better than the competition is to be different first.
The grandmasters didn’t stop studying AI. They just stopped letting it make all their decisions during the game. It’s time for marketers to do the same.
Your Brain Is Your Most Underrated Marketing Tool
MIT Media Lab published a striking study in 2025. Researchers divided participants into three groups: one used ChatGPT to write essays, another used a search engine, and the third used nothing but their own brains. They measured cognitive engagement using EEG equipment throughout.
The results were telling. Brain-only participants showed the strongest, most distributed neural networks. Search engine users showed moderate engagement. LLM users showed the weakest connectivity, and cognitive activity scaled down in direct relation to external tool use. (MIT Media Lab) The researchers named the phenomenon “cognitive debt.” It is the price you pay for outsourcing your thinking to AI.
Participants who used their own understanding first, then introduced the LLM, performed better in both cases, with more strategy, structure, and quality. The cognitive depth established through thinking first was carried through when AI was introduced. (Medium)
In other words, Human-First AI Marketing isn’t just a philosophy. It’s a performance advantage. The people who think before they prompt produce better work with AI than the people who skip to the prompt.
That’s the game changer: Bring your brain to the table first. Let AI amplify what’s already there.
The AI Productivity Myth Nobody Wants to Admit
There’s a widespread assumption that more AI always means higher productivity. The data is starting to push back on that.
A 2025 randomized controlled trial from METR studied experienced open-source developers working on their own projects. Developers predicted AI tools would reduce their completion time by 24%. The actual result was that AI use increased completion time by 19%. AI made experienced practitioners slower, despite their expectations. (arXiv)
This doesn’t mean AI isn’t useful. It means context matters enormously. AI accelerates certain kinds of work and slows down others, particularly the work that depends on deep familiarity, judgment, and creative problem-solving that can’t easily be outsourced to a model trained on everyone else’s data. You know, marketing strategy, creative, and audience empathy…
A Harvard Business Review study of over 3,500 people found that AI tools led to performance gains, but also made employees less motivated and more bored when they had to work on tasks without AI assistance. (Harvard Business Review) The productivity gain comes with a dependency cost. When you outsource your thinking long enough, you start losing the capability to do it yourself.
This is your official warning to be strategic about where you deploy AI.
The grandmasters who play suboptimal moves aren’t actually making poor moves if they increase their chances of winning; they’re choosing to play a game where human judgment creates more value than algorithmic precision.
The Marketing Rules Worth Breaking
Here are a few conventional marketing plays that deserve more scrutiny than they get, especially in the AI era.
“Optimize everything with data.” Data is excellent at improving things that already exist. It can tell you which version of something performed better. It can’t tell you whether you’re doing the right thing in the first place. The most important marketing decisions, your positioning, your voice, your offer, your audience, require judgment that a dashboard can’t provide. Rory Sutherland has spent a career making this case: the most valuable marketing insights often look irrational in a spreadsheet and obvious in hindsight.
“A/B test and let AI pick the winner.” This one sounds reasonable until you look at what it actually measures. A/B tests optimize for whatever metric you choose, which is rarely the metric that matters most. AI will happily identify the subject line that generated the most opens and completely miss the one that started three real conversations with qualified buyers. Open rates measure curiosity. They don’t measure trust, purchase intent, or whether the reader felt like a real, human person just reached out to them.
“Volume and consistency win.” Publishing more content into a crowded feed is the chess equivalent of memorizing more opening lines. Useful, right up until your opponent stops caring. One piece of content that says something true and specific about your buyer’s real situation is worth more than thirty posts optimized for LinkedIn’s algorithm. If your content strategy is primarily a volume game, you’re in a race to the bottom with everyone else running the same play. Think about the difference between adding 8 Pawns to your marketing plan instead of one Queen. The Queen is much more powerful.
“Titles and subject lines need to be click-bait to be effective.” Engineered curiosity gaps train your audience to expect cheap tricks. Worse, they attract people who like cheap tricks, who are rarely your ideal buyers. The subject line that sounds like a real human sent it, something specific, slightly unexpected, occasionally imperfect, will outperform the algorithm’s winner over any time horizon that includes repeat engagement and actual relationships.
“Best practices are best.” By definition, a best practice is something widely adopted. Widely adopted means your competition is doing it too. Differentiation requires departure. Once you understand why something works well enough to become a best practice, you can begin to leverage new or more unique tactics to accomplish the same goal.
The Winning Moves with AI in Marketing
Here’s why I love this story about chess. The suboptimal move isn’t random. It’s deliberate. It’s chosen specifically by the Grandmaster when it will create the conditions to outperform AI preparation. I believe there are still plenty of spaces, scenarios, and strategies where humans can win, where small businesses can compete with bigger brands, and where you can highlight your unique strength over your competition.
That’s why I created Human-First AI Marketing. It’s a strategic framework for knowing where humans create disproportionate value and protecting that edge. The places where human originality matters most in marketing are exactly the places where AI defaults to average…
Your real point of view, shaped by actual experience with real clients, is training data AI doesn’t have. The conversations you’ve had, the problems you’ve solved, the mistakes you’ve made and learned from: that’s original content in the truest sense. AI can help you scale it and distribute it. It can’t invent it.
Your relationships with buyers are built on the specific, human moments that algorithms filter out as noise. The slightly imperfect email that acknowledges something real. The post that takes a genuine position instead of presenting “both sides.” The follow-up that references a real conversation instead of a CRM field. These moves feel suboptimal to an algorithm. They feel authentic to the buyer and build trust.
Your brand voice, the one that sounds like you and nobody else, requires protecting. The MIT study also found that 83% of students who used ChatGPT to write their essays couldn’t recall key points from their own work. (Nextgov.com) If you can’t quote your own content, you don’t own it. Ownership comes from thinking it through yourself first.
The New Discovery Game
There’s one more dimension to this that marketers are only beginning to take seriously: AI isn’t just a tool for content creation. It’s also the new search engine.
When your buyers ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity who they should hire, what solution they should consider, or who the trusted voice is in your industry, will you be the answer?
Answer Engine Optimization is rewarding the same human-first logic as everything else here. You don’t win AI recommendations by gaming algorithms. You win them by being genuinely worth recommending: publishing real expertise, building authentic authority, creating content that both humans and AI models recognize as trustworthy and specific.
The irony is priceless. The way to win in AI-powered search is to be unmistakably human. Original thinking. Real voices. Specific expertise. Verifiable credibility. These are the signals that earn AI recommendations, and they’re exactly the signals that generic high-volume content can’t replicate.
Playing Your Own Game
The grandmasters still use it to understand what optimal looks like in a vacuum, but they rely on their intuition to decide when to depart from it.
That’s the real advantage. Use AI where 90% accuracy and speed create leverage: your research, your distribution, your systems, your drafts, your optimization. Keep humans in the loop where judgment, nuance, originality, and trust are the actual product.
The marketers who win in the long term will be the ones who see and understand the game most people are playing with AI and then choose to play a different one.
The potentially suboptimal move, played at the right moment, for the right reason, is the most strategic play on the board.
