I spent a day at a Google workshop near Chester, a short drive away in Birkenhead, and the part everyone wanted to talk about was the same part everyone is quietly nervous about. Where does AI actually fit in marketing. The honest answer has two halves, and they pull in opposite directions. AI is a genuine gain for some work and a genuine risk for other work, and treating it as one or the other is where stores get into trouble.
Where AI Clearly Helps
For day-to-day tasks, the potential is enormous and largely uncontroversial. Sales emails, document analysis, data processing, all of it gets faster. Developers and analysts can now use AI alongside tools like Excel to build macros, widgets, and automations far quicker than before. The workshop showed examples that are already mainstream, like Mailchimp generating graphics and copy inside its own interface, and Shopify producing product descriptions on demand.
I use it this way myself. I am dictating this post by voice and using AI to transcribe it, check the spelling, and tidy the structure before I share it. That is the productivity half of AI, and for a small business or a busy marketer it is a real lever. It removes friction from the work you were always going to do.
Where Google Still Punishes It
The other half is where people get burned. AI makes it trivial to generate articles at scale, and that is exactly the temptation Google is moving against. From what I see in Search Console, traditional blog sites, the ones where real writers produce careful articles, have lost traffic through recent updates. At the same time, sites that lean on thin, AI-spun content are not being rewarded for the volume either.
So there is a real tension. AI looks like an improvement to content production, while Google appears to penalise large amounts of low-effort AI content. That makes the future of mass-produced articles hard to predict, and it makes betting your store’s organic traffic on them a poor risk. If your traffic is already soft, the first thing to understand is why, which is the work I described in fixing the Google Search Console issues that quietly hold a store back.
How I Use It Day to Day
The way I square the two halves is simple. I let AI assist the work, and I do not let it replace the judgement. Transcription, drafting, data crunching, first passes: yes. Publishing machine-written articles by the dozen and hoping Google does not notice: no. The assistant speeds me up. It does not get to decide what is worth saying.
This is also why I tell founders to test how AI already describes their brand, which I wrote about in asking ChatGPT about your brand before your customers do. AI is now part of how people discover and judge a store, whether you use it or not.
The Line I Draw
We are clearly living in a new era of AI tools, and it is genuinely exciting to think about the specialised applications coming for different industries. But the excitement does not change the rule I work to. Use AI to do your existing work faster. Be very careful using it to manufacture the content that your rankings depend on. One is a productivity gain. The other is a bet against the platform that sends you traffic.
MageCloud AI Note
Two Faces of AI in Marketing
PRODUCTIVITY TASKS
Use it
Sales emails, data processing, transcription, and spreadsheet automation.
PUBLISHED CONTENT
Be careful
Google is moving against thin, mass-produced AI articles.
Paul Ryazanov · MageCloud · notes from a Google AI workshop
If you want to talk through where AI fits in your own marketing without putting your organic traffic at risk, come and find me at the next Ecommerce Camp UK. It is one of the questions every founder in the room is working through right now.