Interview - AI Won't Decide the Future of Marketing. We Will. With Pats McDonald.

EP 228 · Aug 18, 2026 · 28 min · Pats McDonald

0:00 / 28:28

The short version

What if the biggest mistake we're making with AI is the way we talk about it?

Pats McDonald, Chief Strategy Officer at Dentsu Creative, joins the Sleeping Barber Podcast to challenge one of the dominant narratives surrounding artificial intelligence: that AI itself is determining what comes next.

Her argument is simple: AI doesn't make these choices. People do.

We explore what that means for marketers, strategists and leaders as AI becomes embedded in everyday marketing practice.

Pats explains why AI's greatest opportunity isn't simply doing more with less, but enabling ideas that previously weren't possible. We discuss the danger of “strategy-ish”—plausible, polished strategic thinking that never gets somewhere genuinely distinctive—and why strategists should use AI to identify category conventions so they can deliberately break away from them.

We also tackle one of the biggest organizational questions surrounding AI: if technology increasingly performs the work traditionally given to junior marketers, how do we develop the next generation of senior talent?

Plus:

Why strategists need to understand both consumers and algorithms
Why curiosity may become more valuable than having all the answers
How AI can expose category clichés and strategic blind spots
Why data hygiene and fact-checking become even more important
How AI could become institutional memory for brands
Why marketers should design for difference rather than scale sameness
What responsible AI leadership actually looks like

Ultimately, Pats leaves us with a powerful distinction:

Stop saying “AI will.” Start asking what people, enabled by AI, will choose to do.

Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction

01:03 - Stop Saying “AI Will”

02:58 - How AI Is Changing Strategy

05:40 - Doing What Wasn't Possible Before

06:50 - What Happens to Junior Talent?

08:35 - Specialists vs. Generalists

11:35 - Curiosity as a Strategic Skill

13:45 - Can AI Accelerate Curiosity?

15:10 - Why Leaders Must Keep Learning

16:50 - The Danger of “Strategy-ish”

18:10 - Designing for Difference, Not Sameness

19:45 - AI, Bias and Strategic Blind Spots

21:05 - Why AI Still Needs Fact-Checkers

22:45 - Can AI Prevent Strategic Drift?

24:15 - AI as Institutional Brand Memory

25:55 - Great Examples of AI in Creativity

27:35 - AI Becomes Part of the Creative Toolkit

28:50 - Human Agency and the Future of AI

30:05 - Stop Saying “AI Will”

Chapters

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Sleeping Barber Podcast. Easy things. People say, oh well, you know, we don't need entry-level talent because AI can take care of that. And I think as an industry, if you give up on entry-level talent, you've kind of given up on your future. You're saying we've only got another kind of 10 years in us, which is a really dangerous place to be.

SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Sleeping Barber Podcast, the place for business leaders to get the best and most credible information on marketing, strategy, and innovation. Your hosts, Mark Binkley and Vasily Storos, share their experiences as they gather insights from the world's leading experts. Now, on with the show.

SPEAKER_03: Yes. Hey, welcome back. We are with Pat McDonald. Thanks for joining us today. Pleasure. Super excited to have you here. You were on the panel on stage at Cannes earlier this week, speaking a lot about the future and planning for the next 18 months. And it's I wanted to kind of maybe sorry, before we even jump off into the questions, the chief strategy officer at Densu Creative, I should have introduced you to that. Sorry, straight, straight on that. We originally met because of an article, a series of articles I've been writing for work. And you've really been leading a charge with AI for Densu