There's a tension at the heart of modern marketing that every leader is grappling with: How do you harness AI's incredible efficiency while preserving the human empathy that makes marketing truly resonate?

According to Ad Age's November 2025 AI Marketing Playbook, the most successful brands aren't choosing between AI and human creativity—they're discovering how to orchestrate both in harmony. As Debbie Woloshin, CMO of Stitch Fix, puts it: "AI provides tremendous opportunities to improve how we work. It helps us move faster, surface insights quicker, scale creative production, and deepen personalization. However, what AI cannot provide is empathy."

Let's explore how three leading brands are finding this balance—and what frameworks they're using to determine when AI enhances the work and when the human touch is non-negotiable.

‍

The Empathy Equation: When Human Touch Is Non-Negotiable

Stitch Fix offers perhaps the clearest example of this balance in action. The brand operates in an intensely personal category—helping people feel confident in what they wear. Their Retail Therapy brand platform spotlights the pain points of traditional shopping and how Stitch Fix solves them by telling stories rooted in actual client experiences.

"At Stitch Fix, we have a highly engaged community of clients who connect with us at a personal level," Woloshin explains. "Telling these stories requires a human touch that AI can't replicate."

But that doesn't mean Stitch Fix avoids AI. When they launched Stitch Fix Vision—their Gen AI-powered style visualization tool—they approached it with intentional balance. Vision offers personalized imagery of clients in shoppable outfit recommendations based on their style profile and the latest trends.

The Implementation Framework:

Before making Vision available to clients, Stitch Fix rolled it out as an employee beta. This human-first testing approach enabled them to identify moments where AI "didn't quite get it right"—imagery that didn't fully capture a person's likeness or proportions.

"Those learnings informed improvements before launch, from refining our model to implementing quality guidelines," Woloshin notes. "It's still in its early days, but we already see tremendous potential for tools like Vision to make shopping more personal and inspiring—helping clients see themselves in styles they may not have imagined themselves in before."

The Empathy-Efficiency Matrix

‍

The Authenticity Challenge: Cutting Through AI Sameness

Mike Zeman, CMO of Life360, identified another critical dimension of this balance: standing out in a sea of AI-generated content.

"The risk is that if everyone relies on the same models and similar enough prompts, the creative outputs risk becoming more and more similar," Zeman explains. "If we have to choose between saving money and maximizing our chances for a true and novel creative breakthrough, we'll choose the latter."

Life360 demonstrated this principle in action with a recent campaign that used real animation instead of AI. The audience response was telling: The most-liked comment on the original TikTok, with over 30,000 likes, thanked them for "using real animators." When they followed up with behind-the-scenes content showing the animation process, it earned nearly two million views.

"It was a good reminder that audiences are still craving a human touch and, at least for now, will reward brands that maintain it," Zeman notes.

Zeman's Philosophy on AI's Role:

"For me, AI's biggest upside today is automating much of the marketing workflow, project management, and basic content creation so our people can focus more on those bold ideas and storytelling."

This reveals a crucial insight: AI is most valuable when it elevates human work, not when it attempts to replace it.

‍

The Taste Paradox: Developing Human Voice Alongside AI Skills

Jinal Shah, Chief Customer and Marketing Officer at Zip, articulates perhaps the most nuanced challenge: "My biggest worry with AI is its potential to make people intellectually complacent and tasteless. Creativity, curiosity, and critical reasoning are muscles that grow with use. I also worry that over-reliance on AI will create acceptance for tasteless genericness."

Shah's concern centers on "taste"—that indefinable quality that elevates marketing from good to great. But her solution isn't to avoid AI. Instead, she advocates for a dual-development approach.

"Because we are at the frontiers of possibilities, the only way I can address this is by encouraging intensive usage of AI while also encouraging my team to explore their own voices and develop their points of view," Shah explains.

The Logic Behind This Approach:

"One can assume that richer inputs into AI will yield richer outcomes. And encouraging adoption of the technology and perusal of creative growth in tandem can lead to a more graceful dance between humans and AI."

This reveals a profound truth: **The quality of AI outputs is directly proportional to the quality of human inputs.**Teams with well-developed creative taste, strategic thinking, and unique perspectives will generate better AI-assisted work than teams that haven't cultivated these skills.

‍

‍

The 160-Hour Dividend: What Humans Do With Freed Time

Instacart's experience illuminates another dimension of this balance: What do creative professionals do with time saved by AI?

After building stronger guardrails and training a closed AI model on their brand visuals, Instacart cut video production timelines by 160 hours per project using tools like Capsule and PlayAI.

But here's the crucial question: What happened to those 160 hours?

As CMO Laura Jones emphasizes, "Our marketers stay in the driver's seat for storytelling." The time saved isn't about doing less work—it's about elevating the type of work marketers can focus on. Instead of spending hours on production mechanics, they can invest that time in:

• Strategic storytelling development
• Brand authenticity checks
• Creative ideation
• Consumer insight synthesis
• Relationship building with customers

The Instacart Principle: "AI is a creative superpower, not a substitute for human insight."

‍

A Framework for Finding Your Balance

Based on these examples from leading brands, here's a practical framework for determining when to use AI and when human expertise is essential:

Use AI When:

• Scaling production across multiple formats or channels
• Analyzing large datasets for patterns and insights
• Automating repetitive workflow and project management tasks
• Creating variations of established creative concepts
• Speeding up production timelines for proven approaches

Prioritize Human Expertise When:

• Developing brand voice and authentic storytelling
• Making decisions that require empathy and emotional understanding
• Creating breakthrough creative ideas that stand out
• Building relationships with customers and communities
• Determining strategic direction and making judgment calls
• Ensuring cultural sensitivity and appropriateness

Combine Both When:

• Personalizing experiences at scale (like Stitch Fix Vision)
• Testing and refining creative concepts with predictive insights
• Developing data-informed creative strategies
• Optimizing campaigns while maintaining brand authenticity

‍

The Competitive Advantage of Getting Balance Right

The brands that master this balance will have a significant competitive advantage. They'll move faster than competitors who avoid AI, while maintaining the authentic human connections that pure AI-generated content lacks.

As we've seen across Stitch Fix, Life360, Zip, and Instacart, the formula isn't about choosing between AI efficiency and human empathy—it's about orchestrating both to elevate marketing to new heights.

The future belongs to marketers who can dance gracefully between human creativity and AI capability, knowing instinctively when to lead and when to let the technology enhance their work.

‍

Source: Ad Age, "AI Marketing Playbook," November 4, 2025