I spent hours asking Claude if I need AI agents—here's what changed my mind

Everyone's saying you need AI agents, and you can work three hours a week from the pool. But what if that's not the full picture?

In this episode, I'm breaking down why your business still needs a marketing brain and how to use AI as a tool, not a replacement.

Here's the thing: AI is incredible at giving you information. But it can't diagnose what your actual problem is. It can't understand your specific situation, your capacity, your constraints. It can't tell you what to do when you can't do all the things.

I'm taking you completely behind-the-scenes of a conversation I had with Claude about building AI agents in my own business. Claude told me something that made me laugh: "You know who's screaming at you that you need agents? The people trying to sell you agentic programs."

In this episode, you'll learn why marketing is a three-dimensional puzzle (and why AI thinks linearly), what false capacity really is, and why a good marketing director who uses AI well will get you to results faster than trying to figure it out alone.

This is for you if you're wondering whether AI can actually replace your marketing team, you've been spending hours in AI without seeing results, or you're feeling behind because everyone's talking about agents.

What We Cover: 

✓ Knowledge vs. wisdom—and why it matters for AI 

✓ Why marketing is layered, not linear 

✓ The "false capacity" trap 

✓ What happened when I asked Claude about AI agents in my business 

✓ Why you still need a marketing brain, even in 2026

Join the next Marketing Mixer, a virtual networking event for mom founders. 

Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode, and follow along over on Instagram!
@ruthie.sterrett
@theconsistencycorner

Transcript

Ruthie Sterrett (00:01.39)

Welcome back to the Consistency Corner podcast. And if you're new here, welcome to the Consistency Corner podcast. I'm Ruthie Starrett, host, marketing strategist, founder of the Consistency Corner, where our goal is to help you lighten the mental load of marketing. And there is a tool right now that the old internet, the whole entire world is buzzing about that, you know, allegedly should help us lighten the mental load of not just marketing, but a lot of the things.

It doesn't unload our dishwasher yet though, that's for sure. But that thing is AI. So we are gonna talk today about why I believe AI can't replace your marketing director. Or if AI is the tool to support you enlightening the mental load of marketing, or is it a marketing agency? Or is it somewhere in between? Listen, you don't need me to tell you that the internet is talking about marketing. Like you know it is, we all know it is, it's here.

Okay, it's not coming. It's not we need to get ready for it. It's here.

Ruthie Sterrett (01:07.244)

And there's a lot of different perspectives on marketing. was actually just having this, sorry, on AI. There's a lot of different perspectives on AI and different opinions. And some of them are held very strongly. Some of them are strong opinions held loosely, meaning like people are open to change or being convinced or informed that there is another way. And I was having this conversation with a friend the other day where like there's people who are all in on AI. Like it's here.

We're all in, let's go. How do I figure this out to make money, save me time? It's here, I gotta dive in. Then there's the camp that's like, hey, it's here. Everybody needs to dive in. Like, we gotta figure this out together. Like, come on guys. Like, I'm thinking the recent Reese Witherspoon post where she was like, I'm curious. I think we need to learn about this. I think we need to lean in together. More women need a seat at the AI building table.

which we could go down a whole other rabbit hole on that. I'm not going there, but that's context, right? And then there's the camp that is like, I'm really curious about this, but I have no idea where to start. Or I kind of know how to use it, but I know there's so much more that I could be using it for, and I don't know where to start and how to learn. And I'm already kind of starting to feel behind, right? And then there's the camp that is like, nope, this is not for me. This is not good.

I'm not okay with this, I am against it. And that, those four positions are a spectrum. So you could land anywhere in between those four spectrums, or four positions. But what I'm guessing you're not is the person that's like, huh, what's AI? What are you talking about? Like, we're not there, we're past that. So my hot take on AI is that it's a tool, right?

just like a hammer and a screwdriver or a hammer and a, yeah, a hammer and a screwdriver are tools. But the right tools, and you'll notice I said they have to be the right tools, without the right operator doesn't get anywhere. If you handed me a tabletop saw, a planer, which I only know what it is because my husband bought one so he could build us a dining room table, a sander and a stack of wood,

Ruthie Sterrett (03:35.978)

I cannot make you a table because I don't know how. You gave me the tools, but I don't have the skillset to operate those tools to get the result you're looking for. And a bunch of AI tools that you don't know how to use or you don't know.

how to get the outcome with those tools is not going to do you any good. So I wanna talk today about why I don't think AI can replace your marketing director and what most founders might be getting wrong about how to use these tools. So the frame I keep coming back to is the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge is information.

The internet is full of information. AI is full of information. But wisdom sits in the lived experience and the perspective for how to apply that information in a specific situation, on a specific timeline, trying to achieve specific goals. I mean, you could go to YouTube and find thousands

of videos for hip flexor stretches. If you're like, man, my hips feel really tight. I sit at my desk all the time. There's lots of information available to you. But wisdom from maybe a physical therapist or a chiropractor, their experience and expertise might be able to diagnose the fact that it's not your hips that are the problem. Maybe it's actually your hamstrings.

But you don't know that because you're not a physical therapist, but your hips hurt and so you're doing hip flexor stretches. But because you're not actually doing anything for your hamstrings, you're not getting better. And the information you had without the wisdom didn't serve you. And AI is fantastic for giving you information. And yes, we are getting to a point that it does have some wisdom.

Ruthie Sterrett (05:49.176)

But I don't think it's there yet, 100%, because it's only as good as your input. You have to know what questions to ask it. You have to know what feedback to give it to get the right and good and best outputs. And wisdom is knowing that, knowing what questions to ask, discerning your way through the information you get back, pushing back when it doesn't make sense or when it sounds maybe a little bit too

generic. Here's another like example kind of in the medical world that I think about is

Ruthie Sterrett (06:29.09)

I was talking to a potential client recently who is a physician and this physician was kind of asking for our expertise, myself and some team members about what to do to grow their business in the startup phase. And the physician looked at us and said, listen, I'm not a marketer and you're not a physician. I would never ask you to diagnose yourself. I'm asking you to diagnose

the marketing strategy for my business and then tell me what to do about it. And a lot of marketing agencies, I think this is really important, a lot of marketing agencies and marketing service providers fall into this trap of having a client led strategy. Meaning the client comes to them and says, I want you to do X, Z. I want you to do this, I want you to do this, I want you to do this. Or the client comes to you and says, this is the goal I want to achieve.

This is what I think we should do to get there. Can you execute it? But there's never the conversation of what's the goal you want to achieve and what's the best way to achieve that. How do we diagnose what needs to happen to achieve that goal?

And that's the difference, I think, between knowledge and wisdom. And something that a good marketer, a good marketing director will do is ask those questions. And the reason that I say a client-led strategy is sometimes like a trap that people can fall into is the client comes to the marketer with something that they heard on the internet, something that they read on threads or saw on Instagram or heard somebody talk about in a podcast or even at a conference. And while that strategy that...

that tool might be good, we're not looking at it in context of their entire business and marketing ecosystem. Just like getting more vitamin D might be great for your health, you might need that. But are you getting enough sleep? Are you drinking enough water? Are you also exercising? Like there's all these other things that need to be diagnosed and we have to look at it holistically. And when marketers

Ruthie Sterrett (08:45.972)

lean on a client-led strategy, they're trying to keep the client happy and do what the client asks them to do, even if it doesn't get the results that the client is looking for. So it's important when you work with a marketing partner that you trust them and that they ask good enough questions to diagnose what the actual problem is.

in order to come up with a list of treatments, of recommendations, a strategy that will help us get the results and really prescribe the right next steps. So the reason that this sounds really complicated is because it is. Marketing is not layered. And, or I'm sorry. Okay, scratch that one. Marketing is not linear. It's layered.

It is like a three dimensional puzzle that quite honestly is moving all the time. But AI is trained to think linearly. It's trained to be given a prompt and give you an answer. And it takes a human to say, well, hold on a second. What about this thing over here? Or, okay, that makes sense, but how does that impact this other thing over here?

because all of these pieces and parts of your marketing strategy have to work together in concert. It's like a symphony. And I'm not trying to be insulting to AI. I just don't think we're there yet with layering all the pieces of the three-dimensional puzzle into an effective strategy the way human wisdom actually requires. Especially, and this is really, really important, especially an effective marketing strategy that is

tailored to your capacity. Because as I often say, any marketing strategy can work. It can. But they all take time, money, energy. And most of us, would bet to say 99 % of us, do not have unlimited of those things. And so while AI can say, do this, do this, do this, do this, these are all the things that are going to work, it doesn't know that like you can't actually do all of those things because you don't have enough time.

Ruthie Sterrett (11:07.544)

to do all of those things. Or you don't have enough money to invest in someone doing those things for you. So then you've got to discern, where do I start? What do I do first? What will move the needle on its own? Or if I'm doing this one thing, what's the second thing that needs to be layered in to make it actually work? Like it's the vitamin D all over again.

Like we need the vitamin D, but we also, guess you need calcium to make your body absorb vitamin D or maybe it's the other way around. I don't know, I'm not a doctor or a nutritionist, but you need to make sure you're sleeping enough. You need to make sure you're exercising. You need to lower your stress. Like all the things that have to happen together, it's never just one thing. And it takes a human who understands capacity to discern what do we lean into when we can't do all the things.

So this is where I think it kind of gets even more interesting. And I'll give you a little like sidebar. In my career as a marketer, I have always kind of wondered was the right path being a marketing generalist where I kind of know about a lot of things, podcasting, Google ads, SEO, social media, all the platforms, blog writing, email.

Funnels, like I know enough about all of those things, but I'll be totally transparent. I'm not a specialist in any of those things. I'm like a general practitioner for your marketing. I'm not a neurosurgeon. I'm not a, I don't know, are, oncologist. I'm not a physical therapist, like other medical specialties. But as a generalist,

I know enough about how those pieces and parts fit together and when is the right time to bring in a specialist. But a specialist in just one area might not know the questions to ask about the other areas. And you as the business owner who doesn't, maybe didn't get into business to be a full-time marketer, doesn't have the capacity to think about those questions either.

Ruthie Sterrett (13:26.114)

So when you're hiring a contractor, you're hiring a specialist, you're bringing somebody in to help you, who's taking a look at that specialist's recommendations and making sure they work with everything else that's going on? There is a lot of value in good specialists, but I think a marketing generalist, as your marketing director, who can use AI well, will get you a lot faster than trying to do it on your own.

or piecemeal together specialists and hope for the best. Especially if you're a service provider whose expertise in something is in something other than marketing. You have a wealth of expertise in your field, but maybe you don't have a wealth of expertise in marketing, and that's okay. You didn't sign up to be an entrepreneur to think about that all day. You signed up to be great at the thing that you do or the thing that you love.

Ruthie Sterrett (14:27.714)

So this really connects to something that I've been thinking about a lot lately. And it's how AI is supposed to give us our capacity back. But if we don't know what to ask, we can spend hours having conversations with AI, going down rabbit holes, getting answers that don't actually move us forward. That's false capacity. It feels productive, but it's actually not.

Real capacity does come from discernment and knowing what to ask, knowing what answer is good enough, and knowing when to stop researching and start executing. The tool that is supposed to give you time back can actually eat up your time if you don't have the operator skills. And when we go back to that conversation about the internet is screaming at you, telling you that AI is the only way, this is

really interesting because I read a study from Marketer for Hire, which is a brand whose newsletter I subscribed to that has a really, really in-depth and good substack. And they did an analysis of the top 100 B2B startups and

Every single one of those startups is basically positioning itself as an AI platform. 92 % of the homepages that this study analyzed in the top 100 B2B startups have AI on their homepage. Everybody is screaming about AI. And 75 % of those companies have agent or agentic on their homepage.

So while a lot of us know that AI is the thing and it's here, the agent piece is the part that I think many of us are like, okay, but how do I leverage that? Okay, but what do I do? How do I get an agent? And I'll give you a kind of behind the scenes that in my own business, I'm looking at increasing our capacity by adding team members. And so I was doing an exercise with Claude.

Ruthie Sterrett (16:36.032)

about our organizational structure. Claude knows my offers and what we do for clients. so we're kind of mapping out what are the roles that I need to fill. What would those roles do, individual roles do for our clients, do within my business? What type of capacity does that require to do those jobs? And I asked Claude, I said, okay, but shouldn't we be talking about AI agents? Like what are the AI agents jobs in my business? And Claude,

Claude literally told me, you don't need agents yet. You need job descriptions and an org chart that works for your business model. And then once you have dialed in processes and job descriptions, we can start to look at where agents make sense. And I thought it was really funny that the next thing Claude said to me, because I was like, no Claude, it's 2026, I need agents in my business.

I even like paid for this membership to teach me how to build agents for my specific business because the founder of that company who makes blah, blah, blah dollars, per what she says on the internet, runs her entire seven figure business with 30 agents and one other human. And Claude was like, you know who's screaming at you that you need agents? Is the people trying to sell you agentic programs. And I was like, yes.

That would be true. So while yes, there are lots and lots of tools out there that could help you in your business. And to be fair, like this knowledge versus wisdom thing, before I start building AI agents, I probably need to have a conversation with a seasoned director of operations, COO, somebody in the online space who understands marketing agencies and have that person help me kind of diagnose and talk through what AI agents maybe would make sense in our business.

to happen to that person's wisdom. So hey, if that's you and you're listening, send me a DM, let's have a conversation. But that was a sidebar. We're here to talk about capacity. And if you've been listening to this and thinking like, okay, yes, I do need more capacity. The mental load of marketing is so much. And yes, I keep thinking that like, I'll just use AI to make it easier. There's still gonna be a gap. And...

Ruthie Sterrett (19:03.318)

The consistency corner is here to lighten the mental load of marketing and the corner office is how we fill that gap. Done for you marketing strategy and execution with a marketing director who knows how to use AI, but doesn't use it as a replacement. So if you wanna talk about whether or not that is the right fit for you, the link is in the show notes to book a call with our team and just have a conversation. Is the way to lighten your mental load around marketing

to bring in some done for you support. What could that look like specifically for you? And I really appreciate you being here. And if you have thoughts on AI, send me a DM. Let's talk about this. I love a good voice memo. And I want to hear your perspective and your thoughts on where we are with AI in the online business world and how you think about AI and whether or not it could replace your own business.

because that's really what prompted this podcast episode for me as I was thinking about like, I keep seeing marketing. I keep seeing messaging that was like, you don't need a team. You don't need to hire. You just need all these agents. You can do everything by yourself with AI. You can work three hours a week from the pool with a cocktail in your hand and make a million dollars. I mean, we all know those income claims are ridiculous and we're over that bro marketing for sure.

but it's out there and it does make us wonder and curious and go down on that comparisonitis rabbit hole sometimes. So send me a DM. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic and I'll see you again in our next episode.