The Bet I'm Making on AI, Marketing, and the Next 5 Years
AI can make marketing work faster and more polished, but trust, judgment, and a real point of view become more valuable when credibility is easier to imitate.
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The real marketing advantage AI cannot manufacture
I think the next few years will be good for marketing and hard for many marketers at the same time. AI is making it possible to create, analyze, build, and iterate at a pace that used to require a much larger team. That is exciting. It also means some of the work that once made a marketing role feel secure will become easier to automate.
That tension is why I think trust is becoming the real asset to build.
The problem is not that people will suddenly stop caring whether a business is credible. The problem is that many of the old signals of credibility will get easier to fake. A polished site, a convincing testimonial, a professional-looking video, and a steady stream of content can all be produced with less effort than before. Some of that is useful. Some of it will make it harder to tell who is actually worth listening to.
Marketing has always needed trust. People need to believe a promise before they buy. AI raises the stakes because it can make weak claims look far more convincing than they deserve.
Make the work more honest, helpful, and human
My bet is that the marketers who do well will use AI to make the human parts of their work more visible, not less visible.
That starts with honesty. If an offer has limits, say so. If a tactic did not work, explain what changed. If the evidence is thin, do not wrap it in confidence. In a market full of content that looks finished, a clear point of view with real boundaries becomes valuable.
Helpfulness matters just as much. The goal is not to produce the most posts or the longest resource library. It is to make the next useful thing for the person you are trying to serve. AI can help us research questions, organize material, and turn an idea into several useful formats. It cannot decide what a customer truly needs without a marketer who is paying attention.
Then there is the human part. Values, stories, relationships, taste, and responsibility are not decorative extras around the work. They are the part people can recognize over time. AI can help pull those things into the open, but it cannot supply a lived point of view for us.
Keep learning the practical side of AI
None of this is an argument for sitting out the AI shift. Marketers need to learn what these tools can do and where they fail. Practical experiments still matter. So do the messy outcomes, the failed attempts, and the ordinary processes that get faster or better when a tool is used well.
The point is to use the leverage without losing the judgment.
For a marketing team, that may mean documenting a workflow before automating it. For a consultant, it may mean using AI to get to a clearer recommendation faster while keeping the final diagnosis grounded in the client’s real situation. For a creator, it may mean turning one original idea into several pieces of content without pretending each one came from a different thought process.
AI can make the useful work travel farther. It should not make us less accountable for it.
Build, do not just prompt
I am also watching the growing ability for marketers to build digital tools without being traditional developers. The label “vibe coding” is imperfect, but the underlying shift is real: people who understand a customer problem can increasingly make small software, internal tools, landing pages, and workflow helpers that would once have been out of reach.
That does not mean every marketer needs to become an engineer. It means the distance between an idea and a working prototype is getting shorter. The people who learn how to define the problem, test the result, and improve it will have more options than the people who only wait for a tool to arrive fully formed.
The future will ask more from marketers than producing polished output. It will ask us to be more discerning about what is true, more useful to the people we serve, and more willing to make our own judgment visible. That is the bet I am making.
In this AI marketing podcast episode, Dan Sanchez reflects on two years of the AI-Driven Marketer journey, the accelerating pace of AI, and what the next five years mean for marketers. After a short break, Dan lays out a renewed mission for the show—using AI to make marketing more honest, helpful, and human—while unpacking the tension between massive opportunity and real job disruption ahead.
My Favorite AI Tools
• Tella – https://danchez.com/tella
• High Level – https://danchez.com/highlevel
• Zencastr – https://danchez.com/podtools
• n8n – https://danchez.com/n8n
Resources Mentioned
• Own the Show (book + resources) – https://ownthe.show
Timestamps
• 00:00 – Welcome back + why Dan took a break
• 03:30 – Two years of AI-Driven Marketer: growth, experiments, and lessons
• 08:45 – The hard truth: AI’s impact on marketing jobs
• 13:30 – Why trust will become the most important marketing currency
• 18:40 – New mission: making marketing more honest, helpful, and human with AI
• 24:10 – What to expect in 2026: practical AI, human skills, and vibe coding
• 33:00 – Why vibe coding changes what marketers can build
• 39:30 – Closing thoughts and looking ahead to 2026
Speaker: Welcome back to the AI-driven marketer. I'm Dan Sanchez. My friends call me Danchez. And today is the first episode of 2026. And it's been a few weeks since I've posted anything to this podcast or YouTube channel because I kind of needed it a break. and Today, I want to talk about some of the things I've been reflecting on during that break to think about the past because the show is two years old now and the future of what's coming with AI, what's coming with for marketing, and what it all means for us. because As you all know, I started this show as a just a personal ah journey, a quest to figure out what it means to master this thing called AI in marketing. When I first started, there was only like a half dozen podcasts out there and a few YouTube channels, but very few of them were dedicated to just AI in marketing.
Speaker: And I'm a marketer. I like to grow businesses, my own or as employers at times. And I wanted to figure out what this was going to mean for everybody. I wanted to find out what was working, what wasn't working and figure out what news was actually helpful. And that became this show. And it it worked. It grew. Other people thought it was interesting. Interesting enough that 6,000 of you now subscribe to the show across all the different podcasts, platforms, and YouTube.
Speaker: It seems like most of you are split out between either Apple, Spotify, or YouTube. So you're either watching or listening. And ah this show gets about 20,000 downloads a month. at Every episode probably averages 1,000 to 2,000 downloads, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little yet like less. You know how it goes. um And we've had an awesome time discovering all kinds of things together, right? Like we've we've broken news. I guess we don't break news. We really just contextualize AI news for marketing or and what it means. um
Speaker: I've shared tons of different things that I've learned, ah little experiments that I've shared, even failed experiments that I've shared. And it's been an awesome journey. two years have gone by. i love what marketing is becoming. I love what we can do with AI. And it just keeps getting better and better. But I had to take a step back over the last couple of weeks because, you as you notice from the last few episodes I published, I started talking about the growing problem. I think AI is getting good at a certain rate now, and it's a so it's alarming how fast and how how good it's getting and how yeah capable and how they seem to overcome every barrier that comes against AI to the point where I'm i'm pretty convinced now that it's it's probably going to be detrimental to marketing. or to marketers. It'll be great for marketing. Hard for us who have marketing jobs, right? Or consultants or freelancers or working in-house agencies. All these things.
Speaker: I think it's going to be impacted. So I don't think there will be more marketing jobs. I think there might be less. But I'm still hopeful and I'm still optimistic because as I look at these tools and I see what I can do now because as a result of AI, I only get more excited about the opportunity, about being creative with these things, about being able to do the best marketing of my life at a faster rate and a deeper rate and a much more, I don't know, like the content's just so much better as a result of what I can do with AI now that I can never do before. So that also just gets me so excited about the future. So it's like we're living in a tension right now of like this possible job loss reality. It's becoming more and more apparent that there's going to be something. It's not just going to be marketing. It'll be a lot of white collar work in general. Of course, there's safer industries. There's less safe industries. There's safe marketing jobs. There's less safe marketing jobs. In the last couple episodes, I talked about what I think the future jobs of marketing will be.
Speaker: um So you can go check out that episode. I'll link to it in the show description. But I'm not going to cover that here. What I wanted to talk about now is the bet that I'm making on AI and marketing over the next five years. Because the next five years are going to be, is going to have a lot of tension in it. There's going to, it's going to be, it's going to be the best of times and the worst of times from it.
Speaker: And it'll take a couple of years. It'll take, you know, three, five years for this to see its way through and for a new normal to be set. But I wanted to talk about the main thing.
Speaker: And I think the big topic that is going to be probably the main conversation piece across all of us, and I don't even see this on LinkedIn right now, but I think this will be the main thing we see on LinkedIn in a couple of years, is this word called trust.
Speaker: ah Marketers have been talking about trust for a long time. We know that without trust, people don't buy. They have to believe what you're saying in an order for them to buy. is why we have all the credibility indicators and the testimonials and the endorsements. why we even have graphic design to a large degree to look, quote unquote, professional so that people believe that we're actually legit.
Speaker: But as AI comes and makes it easy for anybody, including the worst of us, the scammers, the people actually trying to harm people, are going to look more and more legit all the time.
Speaker: All the credibility indicators will be easier to fake than ever. There will be influencers out there making video after video, and will look like real people. So who do we trust? Trust is going to be the key thing that we are fighting for or striving for and trying to build So that's going to be a big topic moving forward with this podcast to the point where I've created a mission statement, something that I want to champion and be known for with this particular show going forward. And that is make marketing more honest, helpful, and human with AI.
Speaker: And it almost seems like a contradiction. Like how do you become more human with AI? But that's the thing that I was excited about. the thing the The optimism that I have is that with these tools, I could do more human work, not only set aside time for the relationship building and the things that only humans can do, but also be more creative and more ah prolific because I can create content faster and repurpose things that are truly my thoughts and ideas and just recrafted for different mediums faster.
Speaker: And that's what good tech has always enabled us to do. But in this show moving forward, this mission, I guess, is almost the promise that I have crafted and I'm now setting forward to create this year in 2026 is to help you become more honest, more helpful, and more human, but with AI. We're still the AI-driven marketer.
Speaker: But we want to use AI to bring out the best parts of us, the most honest parts of us, and the most helpful parts of us. That's always been at the core, like the the the the roots of my values is to be helpful, just to be humble and to be optimistic.
Speaker: And so we want to lean into that with this show with Ken and with Travis, my brother, the co-host that we'll be doing the show with tomorrow, is to lean into those values and to help you walk in them too. So if you continue to listen to the show, just know that everything I'll be producing will try to push towards that mission. And here are three things that you can expect to hear more from me about in this this marketing show. ah One is that we're still going to be covering very practical things.
Speaker: step-by-step guides, practical experiments that I'm running, the good, the bad, the ugly, things that you need to know as marketers in order to do better with AI. Because I think that's a big component ah that we still need a master. We can't ignore AI. We really need lean into it, learn how to use it to the best of its abilities.
Speaker: So that's one. That's what most people love about the show is the practical use cases. And we're going to continue doing that. The next one is we're going to be leaning in a little bit more, as you could probably tell from the last few months, into some of the soft skills around AI or the human part, the part that AI can't actually duplicate. yet can come alongside and amplify. These are things like your values, like your personal brand, like stories.
Speaker: How can AI assist in helping you pull those things that are uniquely yours out into the world to advance your business or your cause or whatever your marketing?
Speaker: How do we do that in the most human way possible? We're going talking a lot about that this year. In fact, Ken and I just finished publishing the book that becomes the foundation for a lot of that content. If you want to check it out, it just like it literally just hit Amazon yesterday. It is at ownthe.show.
Speaker: Yes, it's one of those creative domain hack websites because all the good domains were taken. So it's ownthe.show. We got creative with it. So go check it out. The book is available on the website for free. You can read it all on the website. And if you subscribe to our newsletter, you can get the PDF and the audio book as well. We're going to be seeing a lot more tutorials on how we created the whole book and all that kind of stuff coming up on the show really soon. So but still, number one, more practical advice on AI marketing and some of them about how are we made a whole book with AI to the soft skills around AI or the part that AI can't fake. And number three, vibe coding.
Speaker: Yeah. We're going to be talking ah a lot about vibe coding this next year because it's finally hit a level where it's accessible to marketers to do, even if you don't know anything about code. It's a little bit harder right now, but those who lean into it early will have a massive advantage over those who where it becomes really, really easy later on. I think vibe coding is even not a great way to put it because we're not coding, we're building, really.
Speaker: And a lot of the things we do is online. It's digital. A lot of the things we build aren't just designs and videos and copy. It's dealt with code. And nowadays, you don't have to know how to code in order to build things. And this is going to be really important. I think things like using a vibe coding tool is even going to replace a lot of our automation tools, our in-between tools, our Zapier tools, even our website builder tools. I've been a longtime fan of WordPress, and I'm like, I don't think i'm going to be building WordPress sites anymore. I think I'm just going vibe code them all and build them specifically the way I need them or the way my clients need them or whatever I need.
Speaker: I could just ask AI to build it and there it is. Of course, it's not that simple. There's still a lot to learn with all these things and it' ah and it'll get better over time. But we're going talking a lot about that on the show. How to start leveraging these Vibe Coding apps in order to build things we had no business building before as marketers.
Speaker: That's exciting. So those of three things. Again, the practical systems and steps everybody loves about this show, the soft skills of AI that can never be stolen by AI, but amplified great parts that make us truly human.
Speaker: And thirdly, vibe coding so we can begin building better as marketers. So thank you for joining me this last year or two years, however long you've been subscribed. And I'm looking forward to learning and mastering this thing called AI and marketing in 2026.