Use AI to Find Where Your Marketing Leaks — Not Just to Make More of It

Ask most teams how they use AI for marketing and you'll hear some version of "we make more stuff, faster." More blog posts, more social captions, more email variants. That's useful. It's also the least interesting thing AI can do for your growth.

Here's the problem with production-first AI: if people are already dropping off somewhere between your ad and your checkout, making more ads just pours more water into a leaky bucket. The highest-leverage use of AI in marketing right now is diagnosis — finding the leak before you spend more to fill the bucket.

(If you want the broad overview of AI across every marketing function, I covered that in How to Use AI as Your Marketer. This post goes deep on one job.)

1. Turn your customer conversations into a map of objections

You already have the most valuable marketing research you'll ever get: sales call recordings, support tickets, onboarding chats, cancellation reasons, reviews. Most of it sits unread because reading it is slow.

Export a month of it, remove personal details, and ask an AI model to do three things:

• List every reason someone hesitated, in their own words.
• Group those reasons and count how often each appears.
• Quote the three clearest examples of each group.

The output is a ranked list of what's actually stopping people. Compare it to what your website talks about. The gap between "what customers worry about" and "what your homepage answers" is usually where your conversion problem lives.

2. Have AI walk your funnel like a first-time visitor

Paste in your landing page copy, your signup form, your welcome email, and your first in-app screen — in order. Then ask: "You're a busy [your buyer] who clicked an ad about [your promise]. Walk through each step. At each one, what do you understand, what are you unsure about, and what would make you leave?"

This isn't a substitute for watching real users. It is a fast, free way to catch the obvious breaks: a promise in the ad that the landing page never mentions, a form asking for information nobody has handy, a welcome email that points somewhere other than the next step.

3. Ask your analytics better questions

Measurement tools are becoming conversational — Google is adding agentic features to its Meridian marketing mix model and building it into Analytics 360. You don't have to wait for your stack to catch up. Export your funnel numbers by step and by channel, hand them to an AI model, and ask:

• "Where is the biggest drop between two consecutive steps?"
• "Does that drop differ by channel, device, or plan?"
• "What are three explanations for that pattern, and what data would tell them apart?"

The last question is the important one. AI is good at generating hypotheses. Your job is to pick the one worth testing.

4. Check how AI assistants describe you

More buying journeys now start inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity — and in September, OpenAI began piloting ads that open a conversation with a brand's own AI agent inside ChatGPT. That makes "what does AI say about us?" a marketing question, not a curiosity.

Ask each assistant to explain what your company does, who it's for, and who it would recommend in your category. If it can't describe you clearly, the fix usually starts on your own site: a plain-language statement of who you serve, what you do, and what makes you different, written so a human and a model can repeat it accurately.

5. Use AI to write the follow-up, not just the first touch

Once you know where people stall, AI becomes genuinely powerful for production — because now you know what to produce. Write a short message for the specific people who stalled at the specific step, addressing the specific objection you found in step one. That's a far better use of an AI writing tool than another generic newsletter.

What stays human

AI can surface the pattern. It can't decide which problem is worth fixing first, or whether a fix fits your brand, your customers, and your capacity. That judgment — picking one priority instead of twelve — is the part that moves numbers.

It's also exactly what the Growth Fix does. In one fixed-price session, I trace your journey from first touch to paying customer, name the biggest drop-off, and implement one improvement with you. It's $997 and deliberately small.

Find where your marketing leaks →