Elton Boocock, founder of Thinkivity – which provides AI consultancy and training exclusively for the UK glazing industry – explains why when it comes to marketing, AI is a brilliant assistant, but a terrible autopilot.

AI is now a permanent part of marketing in glazing and everywhere else. Used well, it makes you faster, sharper, and more consistent. Used badly, it floods the internet with bland noise and quietly destroys your brand.

For me, AI is a creative assistant, not a marketing manager. It helps generate ideas, explore angles, and draft copy at speed. But it cannot be trusted to run your marketing without a human in the loop.

If you are staring at a blank page, AI is perfect. Ask it for ten angles on a topic, five hooks for a Facebook post, or three campaign ideas for a slow month. In glazing terms, that might be asking ‘how to position aluminium versus PVC-U without starting a debate in the comments!’

AI is also excellent for first drafts. Email campaigns, landing page sections, brochure headlines, ad variations etc.

It can also help you improve what you already have. Paste in an old blog and ask, “What is unclear, what is too long, where do people lose interest?” Or ask it to tighten copy, keep the meaning, but make it more direct. If you feed it your tone of voice, examples of past posts, and the sort of customers you want, it can get surprisingly close.

Where AI is having a negative impact

The biggest negative impact is sameness. You can spot AI PR or social media a mile off. Vague claims, generic enthusiasm, and paragraphs that say a lot while meaning very little. If your marketing starts to sound like everyone else, you lose trust and that’s the one thing that will switch your audience off fast.

The next issue is confidence without truth. AI will happily write a convincing paragraph that is slightly, or even completely wrong, and it won’t warn you. In our world, even ‘slightly wrong’ can mean complaints, misunderstandings, and costly follow ups. If you publish AI output without checking it, you are not using AI, you are gambling with your reputation.

Subtle brand damage is the silent killer. Set and forget content often removes the human tone that customers respond to. It can also drift into claims you would never make in person. The more automated your output becomes, the less believable it feels, and the lower your conversion rate goes.

AI versus automation

A lot of people blame AI for the flood of poor-quality content. In reality, AI creates the draft, but automation creates the barrage.

AI is the engine that generates words, images, and ideas. Automation is the conveyor belt that pushes those outputs across your socials, email lists, blog, and sometimes multiple accounts, on a schedule, with no pause for judgement.

That is where the real damage happens, not because AI exists, but because businesses connect it to tools that publish automatically, then walk away. It is the marketing equivalent of outsourcing your marketing to a PR company without signing off the output.

Human approval

If you want a simple rule, never automate publishing, automate preparation.

Use AI to generate ideas and drafts. Use automation to organise, tag, schedule internal reviews, and move content into a queue. But keep a human approval step before anything goes out. If you do that, you get the speed of AI without the risk of set and forget marketing.

AI will not replace good marketing. It will replace lazy marketing. The businesses that win will be the ones who use AI to think faster, while keeping humans responsible for the message.