AI Can Write the Brief. But Does It Understand the Business?

We are increasingly seeing businesses use AI to write the briefs they send to Marketing & Business Development agencies. These can arrive with the activity mapped out and precise expectations for cost per lead, open rates and conversion.

AI can be an extremely useful tool for organising the initial thinking behind a brief. However, the authority of the answer can make it easy to overlook how little AI may know about the business, their budget, the market or the work required to achieve the proposed results.

What information was AI actually given?

If the original prompt simply asks for a brief designed to generate more leads, AI has very little meaningful context to work with. It does not know how established the business is, whether it has a warm database, how well it is known in the market or what has previously generated opportunities.

It may also know nothing about the average sales value, length of the buying process, the time between an initial enquiry and revenue, or the resources available to nurture and follow up interest. The business may know these details, but AI cannot take them into account unless they have been provided.

An established company with a recognised name and years of market insight is starting from a very different position from a new business entering the market for the first time. Even if both companies offer a similar service, the same campaign will not produce the same outcome for each of them.

Where that context is missing, AI may fill the gaps with general assumptions.

When a brief asks for more than the budget can support

AI-generated briefs can become broad very quickly. A single brief might request paid advertising, regular LinkedIn content, email campaigns, thought leadership content, search optimisation and new landing pages. It may then attach several objectives to that activity, including greater awareness, more leads and improved conversion.

Each element may have some merit, but the question is whether the available budget can support that level of activity or whether spreading it across so many areas would weaken the overall result.

Can you trust AI-generated marketing forecasts?

One of the biggest concerns is the confidence with which AI can produce performance estimates. It can suggest a cost per lead for PPC or an expected email open rate. The evidence behind these figures may be broad, generic or unsuitable for that particular business. The likely cost of a PPC lead depends on the competitiveness of the market and the search intent available. It will also be affected by the content, landing page and what the business counts as a lead.

Email results will also vary according to the quality of the data, the relationship with the audience and the relevance of the message. General benchmarks cannot properly account for these differences. A campaign may generate relevant interest but still appear to underperform if the sales cycle is long, follow-up is inconsistent or the business does not have the capacity to nurture leads through to a decision.

Once a figure has been included in a brief, it can quickly become an expectation. The risk is that an assumption generated before the agency was involved becomes a performance commitment the agency is later expected to meet.

Forecasting still has a useful role, but figures should be based on the company’s own data or genuinely comparable activity wherever possible. If that evidence does not exist, targets should be treated as assumptions to test and refine.

What happens when AI creates the plan as well?

Some businesses are taking this a step further. Rather than just using AI to write a brief for an agency, they are asking it to create the Marketing & Business Development plan itself.

The same gaps in context now shape the strategy itself. AI is helping decide what the business should do and what results it should expect, despite having limited access to the commercial context and first-hand market insight behind those decisions.

How should businesses use AI when planning marketing?

AI is most useful at the beginning of the planning process, where it can structure initial thinking and identify areas that have not been fully considered.

To make the output useful, businesses need to provide accurate information about where they are now, how good their data is, what they want to achieve, what previous activity has shown and which resources are available.

They can then ask AI to separate the information it has been given from the assumptions it has made, identify what is missing and show which figures rely on general benchmarks.

Turn the AI output into a plan your business can use

Definition brings Marketing & Business Development together around the realities of your business, your market and the way your customers buy. We will challenge the assumptions, establish realistic expectations and help you turn the initial thinking into a plan that can create relevant conversations and support genuine commercial progress.

Speak to Definition about reviewing your Marketing & Business Development strategy.