AI can be a ‘secret sauce’ or a way of ‘democratizing mediocrity’—Here’s how business leaders are getting the best of the technology

Much of the marketing world is handing over creative tasks to AI with fairly mixed results. But Dan Murphy, who leads marketing at canned beverage brand Liquid Death, said AI models can’t get close to the unique original concepts human writers do. In the world of chief marketing officers, AI might not be the panacea some think it is, he warned. “There’s never been an easier time to look like you are doing marketing, but you are actually flaming up cash,” said Murphy during a discussion at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen this week. “The message is not getting into the brain, it’s flicked away in 200 milliseconds, and it is as forgettable as most AI slop actually is.” To be clear, like most companies Liquid Death is using AI to an “extreme level” behind the curtain, Murphy said, and employees celebrate it in workplace messaging platform Slack and joke that Anthropic’s Claude is their new direct report. However, true “zero to one thinking,” said Murphy— referring to investor Peter Thiel’s concept of creating something entirely new—isn’t where AI excels relative to creative human beings. He cited Liquid Death’s collaboration with Spotify as a quick study of the issue. The drink company’s band of “crazy” artists and comedians—including some who previously wrote for satirical publication The Onion and Cartoon Network’s “Adult Swim”—dreamed up the world’s first bluetooth-enabled urn. The reason? So people can listen to music after they’re dead, said Murphy. It cost “a couple hundred grand,” which Spotify covered, and earned the company 6 billion earned media impressions, he added. “We spent a very little amount of money, and we’re able to trace that back to real-world results, awareness that peaks, sales that go through the register, traffic that comes to life with that,” said Murphy. “Our God metric, FYI, for our content that we put out there, is shares. That’s it—is it compelling enough?” Vishal Sood, president of R&D at AI brand and creative ma