When Everyone Can Create Everything, What's Actually Worth Making?
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI Ready CMO
We’re wrapping up 2025, and over the next few days, we’ll be sharing key insights from our year-end report: AI in Marketing 2025 Annual Report.
The report will be available for all subscribers to download in full for free from the 22nd of December.
2025 was the year content production became infinite—and mostly worthless.
McKinsey’s November survey found 88% of organizations across 105 countries now use AI regularly for content. By mid-year, 71.7% of content marketers used AI for outlining, 68% for ideation, 57.4% for drafting. The global AI content creation market reached $2.15 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $10.59 billion by 2033.
Every metric screams “adoption.” Every number says “transformation.” Every marketer can now produce what used to take a team of ten.
But here’s the number that actually matters: only 39% of organizations saw a material EBIT impact.
93% reported faster content creation. 39% made more money. Speed without direction delivered exactly what you’d expect—a flood of content nobody wanted, read, or remembered.
The Taste Gap Your Metrics Won’t Measure
The term “taste gap” entered marketing vocabulary in 2025 to describe the widening distance between what AI can produce and what audiences value. We also published an extensive 4-part series about this topic.
By Q3, 31% of UK marketers identified brand differentiation as their primary challenge. Not “content volume.” Not “production speed.” Differentiation—because when everyone can generate everything, nothing stands out.
The data proves audiences saw through the flood: 77% of consumers could identify AI-generated content. 68% trusted it less than human work. Research showed brand consistency across channels increases revenue by 10-33%, but consistency requires judgment—the one thing AI can’t systematically deliver.
Duolingo’s Rebeca Ricoy said it plainly:
“Creating fun social content isn’t enough anymore. To truly resonate, brands need to create and become cultural moments.”
OpenAI’s former VP of marketing called “taste” a “distinguishing factor” when AI can generate “so much drivel.”
Translation: The competitive advantage shifted from creation capacity to curation capability. And most marketing organizations aren’t structured for curation at scale.
What Happens When Production Becomes Free
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable.
If your role is primarily about executing repeatable processes—writing blog posts, creating social captions, drafting email sequences—the market is deciding you’re expensive infrastructure. AI does these tasks for pennies. Your salary doesn’t justify the output anymore.
But if your role is about knowing what’s worth creating, understanding what resonates, and articulating why one approach works while another fails, you just became more valuable because taste doesn’t scale through automation.
The “taste gap” isn’t just a content problem. It’s a capability crisis. Organizations spent decades optimizing for volume and velocity. Now they need teams that can recognize quality, articulate standards, and systematically produce work that stands apart.
Most marketing departments have five content creators and zero curators. That ratio is about to invert.
The 2026 Landscape Is Already Visible
Consumer rejection will intensify. Research projects 50% of consumers will limit social media use in 2026 due to perceived quality decay. Google projects 75% of searches will feature AI summaries by 2028. Kantar found 75% of AI assistant users regularly seek recommendations.
Connect those dots: Discovery is moving to AI intermediaries. Those intermediaries will recommend brands with differentiation. Brands that look, sound, and feel like AI output risk algorithmic exclusion.
Industry analysis suggests 2026 marks “the unshittification”—audiences rejecting AI-generated fakeness for intentional, human-crafted experiences. The data backs this up: 86% of articles ranking in Google Search were written by humans. 82% of articles cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity came from human authors.
The algorithms—trained on human judgment—prefer human work. Your audience prefers human work. The platforms increasingly favor human work.
Yet marketing teams keep optimizing for AI-generated volume because the metrics are easy to track and the efficiencies are easy to sell to finance.
We will publish our study on AI in marketing in 2025 on the 22nd of December. Part of it will deal with the future of content creation. Stay tuned!
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We’re publishing our complete AI in Marketing 2025 Report on December 22nd.10 chapters analyzing what actually happened this year—content creation, social media, search, email, customer experience, advertising, analytics, operations, privacy, and team structures. Plus, 2026 predictions that will make you rethink your entire strategy.
Stay tuned. This is going to be comprehensive.
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