The AI Marketing
Intelligence Briefing
Why most businesses are getting AI wrong — and what the ones who win actually do differently.
EDITOR’S NOTE
I have spent fifteen years helping businesses grow. And in all that time, I have never seen a technology arrive as fast, promise as much, or disappoint as consistently as AI has in the past three years.
Not because the technology is poor. It is genuinely remarkable. But because most businesses have approached it the wrong way — reaching for the tool before doing the thinking, expecting instant results from a capability that requires patience, structure, and a proper working relationship.
This briefing is the honest conversation I wish more business leaders were having. Not “AI is transforming everything.” Not “AI is overhyped.” Something far more useful: here is what is actually happening, here is why, and here is what to do about it.
Larysa Hale
Founder, Expert Circle
95%
of corporate AI pilots produce no measurable return on investment (MIT: The GenAI Divide — State of AI in Business, 2025)
“This is not a technology problem. The tools are genuinely capable. This is an approach problem. And approach is something that can be learned.”
— Larysa Hale, Expert Circle
Five things most business leaders get wrong about AI
These are not opinions. They are patterns observed across fifteen years of working with founders, directors, and commercial leaders — and validated by the most recent research on AI adoption. They are uncomfortable. They are also actionable.
1
AI adoption is at an all-time high. Results are at an all-time low. These facts are not a contradiction.
Seventy-eight percent of companies now use AI. Ninety-five percent of AI pilots produce no measurable return. The gap is not explained by which tools businesses use — the tools are largely the same. It is explained by how they think about using them. High performers define the outcome first. They brief the tool properly. They measure. Everyone else opens ChatGPT and hopes.
2
The businesses winning with AI are not using better tools. They are asking better questions.
A randomised controlled trial of experienced developers found they took nineteen percent longer to complete tasks when using AI tools. The twist: those same developers reported AI had made them twenty percent faster. They were wrong about their own experience. Feeling productive and being productive are entirely different things. The difference is not the tool. It is the quality of the question you bring to it.
3
The biggest barrier to AI is not technology. It is three fears that nobody talks about openly.
Fear of feeling stupid. Fear of replacement. Fear of losing authenticity. These are the real reasons business leaders hesitate — not budget, not capability, not strategy. And none of them are justified. Properly briefed AI does not make you sound generic. It makes you sound like the most articulate, consistent version of yourself.
4
You are probably already doing the hard part. You just have not connected it to AI yet.
The onboarding process for a new team member — the brand documents, the about page, the client profiles, the value proposition, the competitor landscape — is exactly the context brief your AI needs. Businesses that struggle to brief their AI are usually businesses that have been avoiding some foundational questions. The brief does not create the problem. It surfaces it. And once written, it transforms every output you receive.
5
AI is not a sprint. It is a marathon. And the marathon starts before you open ChatGPT.
Most businesses start with the tool. The ones that win start with the goal. Define the outcome. Write the brief. Set the metric. Then open ChatGPT. The businesses that follow this sequence get compounding results. The ones that skip it get noise — quickly, efficiently, and at scale.
IN PRACTICE
From strategy to £2.5 million
An engineering consultancy. Strong technical capability. Mixed service offering. Unclear positioning. Underperforming sales materials. A brief to Expert Circle: sharpen the offering, differentiate from competitors, produce materials that could win larger projects.
The work began not with content but with analysis. AI was used to examine the existing service portfolio and identify which services were genuinely profitable and which were loss-making. The finding: the consultancy element was significantly underpriced. The operational services were absorbing resource at a cost that was not commercially justified.
The value proposition was restructured around the services that made commercial sense — with pricing recalibrated to reflect actual value delivered. Only then were sales brochures produced. The project took one week. The result was a new positioning that was specific, credible, and distinctive.
AI Insights
AI The Marathon Mindset
Watch this if you’ve been experimenting with AI but are still getting bland results, unclear ROI or more confusion than progress. Larysa Hale breaks down why that happens, what most businesses are getting wrong, and how to shift towards a more practical, results-driven approach. It is a useful watch for leaders who want to stop chasing shiny tools and start using AI in a way that actually supports growth.
YOUR MOVE
Three actions for this week
The marathon does not begin with a training plan. It begins with lacing up your shoes and taking the first step. Here are three things you can do this week — in ChatGPT, right now — that will compound over time into genuine results.
Write your context brief
Open ChatGPT and spend twenty minutes describing your business: who you are, who your clients are, what makes you different, what tone of voice you want to use, and the three ideas you most want to be associated with. Save it. Paste it at the start of every ChatGPT session from this point forwards. This single step changes the quality of everything that follows.
Define three 90-day goals before you produce anything
Before you ask ChatGPT for a single piece of content, ask it to help you define three measurable marketing priorities for the next ninety days. For each one, agree the metric that will tell you it is working. This connects your AI activity to commercial outcomes — which is the only way to measure, justify, and improve it.
Complete one task properly from start to finish
Pick one task. A content plan, an email sequence, a positioning document. Work it through with ChatGPT from the thinking stage to the final output. Brief properly. Iterate until you are genuinely happy with the result. Do not settle for adequate. This first complete cycle shows you what working with AI actually feels like when it is done right.
THE PROCTER & GAMBLE FINDING
A real-world study of 776 experienced professionals at Procter & Gamble found that individuals using properly integrated AI performed as well as a team of two without it. One person. Two people’s output.
Not a content shortcut — a strategic partnership built on structure, context, and clear objectives. (CSIRO, 2025)
DID YOU KNOW?
ChatGPT reached 100 million users in just two months after launch — faster than any consumer application in history.
TikTok took nine months.
Instagram took two and a half years.
Your competitors got access to the same tools you did, almost overnight.
The question was never whether to use AI. It was always how.
This briefing shows you the problem.
The Programme gives you the tools to solve it.
Every briefing is paired with a masterclass that takes you from insight to implementation — with a practical workbook, structured frameworks, and a live accountability session with other senior B2B leaders.
The Programme includes monthly masterclasses, the full briefing archive, the Expert Circle ebook library, and a peer group of managing directors and marketing leaders who are working through the same challenges you are.