Everyone Has Come to the Table: How to Market Your Business When AI Gave Everyone the Same Tools

A map of what AI changed about marketing, why playing it safe stopped working, and the four shifts that keep your business from blending in.

A prospect told me on a discovery call that she'd done everything right with her brand. She took a course. The course used an AI tool. The tool told her what her brand personality type was, and her type was "sage."

So her brand was sage green.

Her website had stock photos, a font she liked, and copy that said all the right things. She'd put in the work and I could see it. I also had to tell her the truth: you could literally be anyone else.

She didn't cut corners. She followed the instructions. That's the problem now. Everyone has the same instructions.

What changed, Cole's notes version

For a long time, making marketing was hard. A website cost real money, a logo needed a designer, a blog post took a weekend you didn't have. That difficulty did something useful that nobody noticed. It filtered. Not everyone could show up looking polished, so the ones who did stood out.

AI removed the filter. Anyone can generate a website in an afternoon, a logo before lunch and a month of captions over one coffee. Everyone has come to the table. (PS I am not saying AI designs look polished but people seem to think they do.)

The people running the biggest marketing departments in the world are seeing the same thing. One of the headline takeaways from this year's Forbes CMO Summit was that AI is making content abundant while attention gets scarce. Lindstrom Company put it more simply: AI gave everyone a voice, and it didn't give your customers more ears.

I said my version on a discovery call, unscripted, and I still stand by it:

"I'm a huge AI fan, like, I'm not putting it down, but it's really bad at certain things, and people are misusing it, and so it's creating all of this noise and generic and cookie cutter. So people are tuning out even faster than before when they see something that's not personalized."

Generic used to be forgettable. Now it's invisible.

Where I stand on AI, so we're clear

I use AI every day in my business. That's how I know what it can't do.

It wasn't on your discovery call. It doesn't know which clients you're trying to stop attracting, why you raised your prices last spring, or the thing you'd never say to a client in a million years. So it hands you the generically correct answer to a question that had a specific one, and it sounds very sure of itself while it does.

We see this in our own studio. Clients run our logo, copy and layout decisions through AI and bring the output back to us as feedback. The advice is confident and wrong, and we spend hours explaining why a decision was made. Once we explain it, they get it. It's also why our intake forms ask clients not to fill them out with AI. General answers in, general brand out.

And bear with me here, because copying is older than AI. Another prospect picked her logo font because a well-known designer in her industry uses it. Lovely font. Just not hers. AI didn't invent borrowed taste, it made borrowing frictionless.

Shift 1: Stand for something someone could disagree with

This is the big one.

If nothing on your website could make the wrong client click away, you have a description, not a position.

Read your homepage headline and ask yourself whether a competitor could paste it onto their site without changing a word. "Compassionate, client-centred care." "Results-driven design." "Helping you look and feel your best." All true. None of them belong to anybody.

Standing for something means saying out loud what you believe about your industry, who you're for and who you're not for. Some people won't like it. You're not trying to offend anyone. You're trying to make the right person feel like you wrote the page for her, and let everyone else move along without wasting either of your time.

We do this at MWD and it costs us. We don't charge monthly retainers, which web designers have done for years and years. It comes up constantly and I have to hold that boundary more often than I'd like. I don't want to change my offering and my beliefs to avoid an awkward conversation, and I'm okay to live with that decision. Same with our Brand-First and Photography policies. If a client wants to skip either one, we'll still build the site, and we'll tell her plainly what it's going to cost her.

Here's what playing it safe looks like when it goes wrong. A client received website copy written in her voice, for her audience. She ran the whole site through AI and rewrote it. It came back formal, robotic and generic. She didn't do it because she thought AI wrote better. Sounding like herself on her own website felt too exposed, and AI gave her somewhere safer to hide.

I get it. Being yourself in public is vulnerable. The reality is the safe version isn't safe anymore. It's the crowded one.

Shift 2: Show your real face

A stock photo is the visual version of vanilla. So is the AI-generated woman laughing at her laptop. Your ideal client has seen both a thousand times this week, and her brain skips them before she knows she's done it.

Brand photography shows the one thing nobody can generate. You. For a therapist, that's the room your clients sit in and the person they'll be talking to. For an injector, it's your treatment space and your face. For an interior designer, it's your work with you standing in it.

It's why we have a Photography Policy on custom websites, and why Lauren, our in-house photographer, is on the team.

And if you're dreading the shoot, same. I like to do one big long shoot once a year. That way I only have to wash my hair and put on makeup once. ;)

Shift 3: A website that was designed, not generated

Anyone can generate a website now. That doesn't mean anyone designed it.

Design is the decisions. What goes first on the homepage. What gets left out. How a nervous first-time client finds the answer to the question she's too shy to ask on a call. Copy works the same way. A page that lists your services and a page that sounds like you sitting across from her are two very different pages, even when the facts on them are identical.

When every website looks finished, finished stops meaning anything. What your ideal client is checking for now is whether there's a real person behind the page with a real opinion she can trust. That comes from a designer and a writer who were on the call with you, asked the uncomfortable questions and wrote down your answers in your words.

Shift 4: Own the relationship with email

The more content there is, the more the platforms decide who sees yours. You can post every day and still reach a fraction of the people who follow you. That audience is rented.

Your email list is the one place you own. These are people who raised their hand and asked to hear from you. When attention is scarce, one person who opted in is worth more than a hundred who scrolled past.

Email is also the easiest place to sound like yourself. Write it the way you'd text a client you like. Tell her what you think about something happening in your industry. Tell her what happened in your week. Send it on a schedule she can count on. A newsletter that sounds like a person is the one that gets opened.

Okay, that's that

Everyone has the same tools now. What nobody else has is your opinions, your face, your voice and your way of doing things that some people won't love.

Vanilla feels safe. It's also invisible.

If you read this and thought about your own website, book a discovery call. We'll tell you plainly where your brand lands today and what it would take to make it sound like you again.