What is the best example of AI in marketing?

The textbook examples are the big recommendation engines. Amazon's 'customers also bought', Netflix personalising its entire homepage per viewer, Spotify's Discover Weekly. Each is AI reading behaviour at massive scale and predicting what will keep you engaged. They're the best examples in the sense of most proven: recommendation systems drive meaningful revenue for these companies and have run in production for two decades.

In advertising, the leading example is what Google and Meta have become. When you run a Performance Max or Advantage+ campaign, AI is choosing audiences, writing headline combinations, setting bids, and reallocating budget between formats in real time. Most advertisers now use AI at scale without thinking of it as 'using AI'. That's how the platforms work.

For a small business owner, 'best example' should mean 'best example to imitate' rather than Netflix. The compressed version looks like this: a cleaning company using an AI assistant to answer every enquiry within minutes, a plumber turning job photos into a month of social posts in an hour, a dental practice drafting patient-friendly treatment explanations that used to take evenings. The technology is the same family; the scale is achievable.

The example we'd point to from our own work: using AI to help build hundreds of local location pages, each one structured around what people in that specific area search for, in a timeframe where hand-writing them would be impossible. AI does the scale; humans do the local knowledge and quality control. That division of labour is the pattern behind almost every AI marketing success story at any size.

The anti-example matters too: businesses pumping out unedited AI content at volume with no human judgement. Google's spam policies name scaled low-value content directly, and readers bounce off it. AI amplifies whatever process you have, for better or worse.