Why AI Can't Replace Your Marketing Brain (Yet) - CustomGPT VS Niche LLM

AI can already help marketers do more with less, but that does not mean it can replace the thinking behind good marketing. A LinkedIn idea raised a useful question: if you put a marketer's knowledge into an AI system, could that system guide people as if the marketer were sitting there with them?

There are two practical routes toward that goal. One uses a CustomGPT loaded with your documents and instructions. The other trains a niche language model on a larger body of proprietary knowledge. Both can be useful. Neither reproduces the full judgment of an experienced marketer.

CustomGPTs are strongest at repeatable work

A general model has broad long-term memory, but its answers about a specific person or method can be fuzzy. Loading relevant documents into a CustomGPT gives it better short-term context. You might add blog posts, LinkedIn posts, strategic frameworks, or a set of instructions for handling a recurring task.

I tested this approach with a life-coach CustomGPT that included my goals, strengths, and writing. It could use the information, but its advice was hit or miss when I asked it to solve a personal problem or troubleshoot a decision. Other personality-style GPTs had the same limitation. They were better than a generic prompt, but not reliably thoughtful.

That does not make CustomGPTs a poor tool. They work especially well when the task is narrow and repeatable. Turning a podcast into a blog post, or turning that post into several LinkedIn posts, gives the system clear instructions and a defined sequence. In that setting, the model can consistently apply your process and produce work that sounds more like you.

Niche models bring more of your knowledge

A niche-trained LLM takes a different approach. Instead of loading your information into short-term context for each interaction, it customizes the model's long-term knowledge with your data, courses, posts, and frameworks. The result can function more like a subject-specific consultant.

That is useful for questions and answers. A model trained on a body of audience-growth material may explain a framework in a way that is much closer to the creator's own approach. Examples such as Chris Walker's knowledge base or an internal Dave Bot show why brands are interested in this direction.

The limitation is that knowledge is not the same as judgment. A niche model may produce a reasonable marketing plan, but a human expert might stop first and ask five questions about the company, market, and objective. Long-term memory can make the model more aligned with a point of view while still leaving it weak at deciding what needs to be clarified.

Keep the human brain in the loop

The useful question is not whether AI can become you. It is where your knowledge and process can help other people move faster. Use a CustomGPT for a defined workflow. Consider a niche model when the value is broader question-and-answer access to a body of expertise. Then keep your judgment involved wherever the task requires diagnosis, prioritization, or a sequence of decisions.

AI can extend your marketing brain, but the best results still depend on the thinking that defines the problem, asks the next question, and recognizes when an answer is not good enough.

welcome back to the AI driven marketer I'm Dan Sanchez friends call me danz and we're on a journey in 2024 to master AI so we can do more with less and better with marketing right because we always have so much to freaking do as marketers it's a black hole I've been told you can always spend more do more and have more Talent doing marketing stuff um and I'm starting to wonder if AI will ever fill that black hole or if it's possible right if we have robots that can do our job for us and that's kind of the topic that I want to talk about uh for this solo episode is if AI can replace your brain the short answer is I don't think it can yet but I want to talk about two possibilities where you can use AI to kind of replicate your own brain like if you were able to consult a protege uh can AI do it for you on your behalf and the the topic of this got started with a post on LinkedIn and I'm going to pull it up here visually but I'll be reading it for all the listeners out there um from Andrea basani sorry if I mispronounced that um but let me go ahead and read the post and then I want to talk about my response to the post and how to learn more specifically around custom gpts and Niche llms and how both can be used to kind of reproduce yourself for others or or for yourself or maybe your your direct reports so let's read the post and then we'll get into it uh he says random weekend idea I was just discussing with a friend let's say I write down most of my marketing knowledge into a few documents or at least the basic key stuff new Founders need to do uh to set up the foundations right then I train an AI model on the specific data I should get something out of it that's different from a generic chat GPT ANW is because it's trained on my exclusive proprietary data so in theory the product might be able to to give Founders basic guidance almost as if they were asking me directly I wonder if it's easily doable and what the final results would look like in terms of quality so it's a really good question and I love that people are thinking about the possibilities that are now possible with AI like I said in the very beginning I don't think this is quite capable yet um but there are two routes to getting this done both fall short in a lot of different ways um but have some have some pros so so let's talk about it um a few weeks ago I talked about the difference in AI memory specifically long-term memory which I have represented here visually is a big circle in short-term memory which I have here visually as a as a very small circle that kind of overlaps with the long-term memory and in the episode I talked about how long-term memory is like all the stuff uh chat GPT was trained on or any uh large language model was trained on it's the whole internet it's all the tweets it's all the books and everything else they threw at it in order to get it to its current level of intelligence and it knows a lot um but you know and I know if you just ask it to write a blog post on product marketing for B2B SAS it's going to give you a pretty vanilla post um and it might hallucinate come up with some weird things in there sometime because the long-term memory like our human long-term memory it's kind of fuzzy right we do better when we load up our short-term memory with uh relevant facts and outline of where we're going um and research that we've done ahead of time so that we can pull them into writing an article AI actually needs the same thing which is why in that episode actually broke down like in order to make AI perform better you need to learn at loading its short-term memory with all the stuff that you would want and things like your prompts are actually loading in short-term memory or chain prompts loading in documents uh web searches your custom GPT instructions docs in your custom GPT or using the custom GPT API in order to feed the short-term memory everything it needs to know and so it can create content or perform the actions that you want more reliably without without relying so much on the long-term memory which causes hallucinations because again the the long-term memory is fuzzy just like in our memory um and I think this becomes an important illustration when considering the two different routes you can use AI to replace your brain and essentially have ai be your your Chief uh representation of yourself either to customers or your team or even yourself right um some there's some pros and cons um so there's two different routes to creating this one is creating a custom GPT loaded up with all the documents uh for loading the short-term memory um and I've tried this before and it works it's it's better than just a vanilla chat GPT right like just asking chat GPT oh what's Dan Sanchez's thoughts on this you know it might be like I don't know how much of my blog posts were loaded into long ter memory but probably not very much um but it'll it'll might take a guess it might do a Bing search to try to go figure out who Dan Sanchez is and what Dan knows um and it might scrape a few blog posts and then get back to them but it'll be pretty rough uh it's probably not going to know a lot but if I loaded uh a custom GPT with maybe like a library of my blog posts and all of my LinkedIn posts and uh maybe some other strategic Frameworks I have for answering questions and dealing with problems well it it do it probably sound a little bit more like me and to be honest I've actually tried this it was one of the first custom gpts I made where I wanted to build a life coach and I armed it with all the information that I had about myself like life goals strength finders blog posts LinkedIn post so I can understand and I fed out a lot of information and I found it was pretty hit or miss when I would ask it questions like hey based on what you know about me what should I do what would be the best way to leverage my strengths for X you know and it would give me an answer and it would do it based on the knowledge but honestly I just found that it was it just wasn't very reliable for problem solving and troubleshooting so while I tried to make that life coach uh out of a custom GPT I found that it just didn't do too well and honestly I've had a few different custom gpts that I've tested where it's like Einstein or whatever and it's kind of like eh eh it's okay it's better than just relying on long-term memory because it's at least pulling from some short-term memory um stuff but it still doesn't do quite as well so that's using a custom GP to replicate uh your knowledge and expertise it is certainly a lot better the problem with custom gpts in general is that they're just bad at general purpose stuff like where custom gpts really Excel is having highly specialized tasks that they do and they just do it over and over again turning a podcast into a blog post turning a blog post into multiple LinkedIn posts or whatever it is that has a task and it has a set step-by-step instructions on how to execute the task within the C GPT that's where they Excel and they do fantastic and produce blog posts that sound like you pretty like to they do a great job of sounded like you I'll put it that way um that's where custom gpts Excel now on the other side there's this option out there and I've not done this personally but I've played around with other people who have uh other versions of this that other people have created and it works pretty well um it's called building a niche llm and it's taking an existing lar language model and then custom customizing it with a lot of your data and your knowledge so that it's not even loaded into short-term memory what you're doing is customizing the long-term memory of an llm like chat GPT with your proprietary data and knowledge and so when you don't even have to load the short-term memory you can be like hey write me if it was customized on all the stuff I ever put out there and it would know about my my knowledge and framework for how to grow an audience for example which I created a whole course on maybe I load all the course knowledge into it all the LinkedIn post all the blog posts everything I've ever created around audience growth and I train it uh this llm on it and then it becomes Dan Sanchez's audience growth tool or consultant and you can ask it questions about audience growth its ability to take all that knowledge and then give custom information back based on that now long-term memory because you've now trained it on that um is much better of course than a plain vanilla custom GPT but there's some downsides with it because you've trained it into long-term memory it's still a little fuzzy it still struggles to break down small thing uh large projects into small tasks because it's the the current limitation it's the current constraint of AI and where it's at in the future it won't have that constraint and they're already figuring out ways to help it break down to think slow so that it can actually break down what are fairly complex projects down into small manageable tax that it can then do really well with for example writing a marketing plan or maybe an audience growth plan is one of those ones where you kind of have to break it down into small steps um to understand the market that you want to get into the business model behind why you're creating an audience the pain points and objectives of the audience how your expertise can correlate to those things how you can create content around those things you see how there's like multiple steps that it can't just think through and solve each one of these now if you created a custom GPT to solve each one of these it' do pretty good um but a large the long-term memory has a hard time thinking through all the different steps you need to do in order to do it well even if it's trained on the way you do it it will still struggle to do it well but it will do a much better job of us utilizing your method in just one shot in order to get it done so I'm scrambling a little bit because it's kind of hard to explain how this long-term memory works but that's what people have done uh I've seen two examples of people using um Niche trained llms one was Chris Walker who launched a a I haven't tested this one but I've heard good good things about it he loaded all the information from his podcast and blogs and articles and case studies and data that he had in refine Labs into his membership area and trained in llm to essentially act like him so you can ask the question and it'll give you answers like Chris Walker would give the answers which is really helpful um but it's still not going to break down a problem like Chris Walker would answer the problem it's more it's more useful for a Q&A type function where custom gpts are great for very specific things uh training and Niche llm to behave more like you based on your data and your Frameworks and uh stuff um it's a better for long for more generic purposes but it still doesn't know how to apply and think through what should actually be asked because you might I might go to Chris Walker's thing and be like hey write me a demand gen marketing plan for company here's here's a few details about the company um and it'll write a plan and it'll do it based on Chris Walker's framework for demand genin but if Chris Walker had been sitting there Chris Walker would have stopped and been like hold on a second before I write you a plan here's five questions of information I need before I write the plan right that's different than how Chris Walker would operate even though it's much more closely aligned with Chris Walker's principles um another example I saw this was Dave Ramsey I have a lot of friends that work there because I live in Nashville Tennessee and that's where his company's located I have a lot of friends that work at Ramsey Solutions and they have a Dave bot it's not publicly available it's just a little internal thing because they're testing and playing with AI and just I don't know they're smart and they're they're staying on top of it internally for the day when it becomes more reliable to to do something with it externally um so you can't test this but I've seen it because my friends have been over and I'm test and I've tested Dave bot against just asking chat GPT base to give me Dave Ramsey answers to financial questions uh since he's a big Finance Guru out there um I'll asked I've asked questions and I've asked the Dave bot questions or at least my friend has on their phone where they can tap into it and the Dave bot is much better at answering in a way that I know Dave Ramsey would answer let's put it that way uh it's much more reliable is it 100% reliable no no because it can still hallucinate it's still you're still pulling from long-term memory in order to do it so because they're a trust-based brand they don't want to release something they don't have a very very strong degree of confidence that it's going to be reliable like 99.999% of the time right um but that is the advantage of loading a custom Niche llm with all your knowledge and then training it and giving it time to process it all um for people to interact with it's great for Q&A but it's still not the same as replicating yourself it's still not the same as identifying the question behind the question that needs to be asked or asking someone who who you're Consulting uh that might be going in a Direction they think they need to go to this direction you're like actually based on what you're saying you don't want to go in this direction you need to go in this opposite direction or a slight deviated op like Road you need to take right and that's the power of a consultant That's The Power of someone who has the experience and the knowledge to be able to guide a a business in the case of the LinkedIn post we're reading later um it's still good for Q&A though I find if you want to know if you want to have direct answers for certain questions loading the long-term memory is helpful because it it'll have much more reliable answers um so can you replicate your brain not yet but you can build a custom GPT that follows step-by-step processes based on your Frameworks and knowledge um to execute very specific results and you can load long-term memory with all your knowledge so that it can give General Q&A style answers but it still can't replicate your ability to identify the actual problem and solve for it uh regardless of what if they ask the right question or not that's still the very human thing that we all can do luckily um but AI is still working its way there and eventually I imagine I will do an update episode where I talk about how to replicate your brain on AI and that'll be fun but for now these are the limitations we have and can still do some amazing things with with where AI is currently at so if you've liked this episode uh please give it the star rating it deserves in the uh Apple podcast or Spotify or wherever you're listening to podcast if you're listening on YouTube please give me a thumbs up makes it all the all the work worthwhile or give me give me a comment or something um and if you want to dive more into AI please go find my AI fundamentals course I promise you will learn something you haven't known before about AI um go to Aid driven marketer.com sourse and you'll even be surprised by how I've designed the course with hyper-personalized course instructions based on the information you put in the form so if for anything go check it out for that reason and get started today [Music]