The fear of alienating one’s customers is warranted, considering AI-suggested ad copy tends to feel like a supermarket birthday cake: the tepid intersection of everyone’s tastes, perfectly inoffensive and underwhelming, pleasant but forgettable. In Wine & Spirits especially, it’s tempting to treat AI’s role in our marketing output like a zero sum game: a choice between efficiency or meaning, novelty or tradition, quantity or quality, transaction or connection. 

Fortunately—with the right approach—it’s actually not all that difficult to retain one’s soul despite dramatically improving one’s productivity in any role. While this does sound like something Chat GPT would write (looking at you, em dashes)—well, there’s nothing I can say to convince you I’m human right now, is there? On second thought, maybe it’s best to just read on.

It’s Worth It.

Used judiciously, AI is the great equalizer. Where small businesses truly had little hope of accomplishing as much as larger teams before, a resourceful startup can now run circles around inefficient, bureaucratic, do-everything-by-committee corporations.

It’s tempting as an up-and-coming wine or spirits brand to feel hopelessly outgunned by the old guard in terms of the resources they’re able to muster (like the distributor’s attention, for starters). In our daydreams of success, we tend to mythologize and even emulate those at the top. Ask an actual employee at one of the largest suppliers how they deploy their giant budgets so carefully, and they may have trouble stifling their laughter. 

Robots Hate This Simple Trick

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