State of AI Marketing: January 2026

Is AI Finally Changing Everything?

Yes, and it’s happening faster than anyone predicted. The tools emerging daily aren’t just incremental improvements—they’re fundamentally restructuring how we build software and run marketing. If you’re not spending 1-2 hours daily learning the new landscape, you’re falling behind. This isn’t hyperbole. The founding engineers of modern AI are saying the same thing.

What the Experts Are Saying

Andrej Karpathy, one of the founding engineers of AI at OpenAI and Tesla, recently posted something that captures this moment perfectly:

I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become… pic.twitter.com/JMp1EStZSi

— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) June 17, 2025

The full context is worth reading: There’s a new programmable layer of abstraction to master—agents, subagents, prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations. It requires building an all-encompassing mental model for fundamentally stochastic, fallible, and unintelligible entities suddenly intermingled with traditional engineering.

As Karpathy puts it: “Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession.”

Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code (one of the most popular AI coding tools), followed up:

3 parts to the learning curve:

1. Accept that it's different. Don't try to use AI like you'd use a terminal or an IDE.

2. Understand what it can & can't do well. You'll want to build deep intuitions for this to pick up on its subtle vibes (which models and prompts are… https://t.co/V8RgXE3qNy

— Boris Cherny (@bcherny) June 18, 2025

His advice: Accept that it’s different. Don’t try to use AI like you’d use a terminal or an IDE. Build deep intuitions for what it can and can’t do well. Learn the Claude Code documentation (I spend 2 hours a day on this and still can’t figure it all out).

What Do These Developments Mean for Web Development?

They mean the obvious: better design, for cheaper, and faster.

With web design, you never paid for the stock image, or the font, or the various components that go into the design. You pay for human time, labor, and expertise.

What has that historically meant? You’ve paid for:

1. A US developer to capture your vision (time/expertise)
2. Pass those requirements to a design team (in-house or remote)
3. The developer spends time tweaking and refining with those third parties
4. They package that info and send it back to you

As an agency owner, I’ve done this. This is the business model of a web and marketing agency—a manager with expertise paving the way and training their staff.

But when I first started Silvermine AI, I was doing AI automations with a law firm. Two lawyers mentioned, “This will cut my need for associate staff.” The managing directors with 20 years of experience only hired associates for grunt work. That grunt work was already being automated by AI two years ago.

In the marketplace, this means:

1. Your competitors are doing it too—this raises the bar for everyone
2. Anyone not doing this will fall behind—bigger, faster, stronger people will move faster
3. A single person with context outperforms teams—explaining context to other humans is now the bottleneck

I actually think this is an amazing time for marketing. Your ability to create great product with AI depends wholly on your expertise. And expertise now means: understanding what humans want.

So wha does this all mean for marketers and web developers? A new skillset will be required to keep up. One that gets the vibes of the AI and the requirements of the profession.

The Rick Rubin Philosophy

Consider Rick Rubin, one of the most illustrious music producers of our time:

@60minutes Rick Rubin is one of the most successful music producers ever, but doesn't consider himself a musician. #rickrubin #music #musicproducer #60minutes ♬ original sound - 60 Minutes

He says: “I have no technical ability. And I know nothing about music.” And: “The confidence that I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel has proven helpful for artists.”

This is expertise—the knowledge of what other humans will want.

Humans will always control the pocketbooks. Even if agents take over purchasing, humans will curate what the agents want. Humans buy what is socially acceptable, trustworthy, good.

What Is My Role as a Marketer?

My role is to guide you from not knowing anything about marketing to guiding the AI agents effectively.

The AI agents will get better. They’ll improve at SEO, copywriting, E-E-A-T authority building. But humans who don’t use AI won’t know this. AI will become increasingly complex tooling that requires expertise to wield.

At Silvermine, we embrace this. We know AI is coming for our jobs—but only if we let it. There’s no mystical AI learning marketing right now. There are humans with marketing expertise teaching AI how to do their job. And there are AI marketers (us) building tooling to guide it, correct it, and refine the edges.

Why AI Will Never Replace Taste

AI will only ever be code. AI can only read code and pixels. It won’t know if a scroll is smooth or if an animation is tacky. Sure, there are human raters behind all AI products, but those will never be tailored specifically to your needs. And sure, we can ask the AI to judge something, but honestly words in our brains don’t make judgment what it is. Judgment is innate and divine. A gift from a God.

AI won’t have taste. It never will. It will simulate having taste. It can mimic any design. But as soon as it develops a “taste,” human nature will shift—what we’ve learned from fashion, art, music, and every form of creative human expression over the last 200 years.

This is where we’ll stand. We’ll get bigger, better, faster, cheaper over time. But we’ll be the ones constantly evolving with taste and expertise.

We’ll build the best website tooling on earth, with the most complete prompts, context engineering, and integration engineering so those websites shine across multiple platforms.

Where Does the Human Stand?

The human will be the decision-maker and gatekeeper. Agents will increasingly get better. No, you won’t need us for simple websites (you never have).

You’ll need a marketer who understands:

• Ads and SEO
• Analytics and Google Tag Manager
• Email marketing and tracking
• Conversion optimization

You’ll need someone who pushes the buttons to configure the 10,000 knobs inside Google Tag Manager. Who has end-to-end knowledge from website design to analytics implementation. That’s marketing in 2026 and beyond.

Yes, Google could build one tool to do most of this—but they could have built it 20 years ago. They don’t make money off websites (Google Sites). They make money on ads. Facebook makes money on ads. Facebook and Google are advertising enemies. There will always be competition. There will always be someone who needs to bridge that gap.

Someone who connects the dots. Who understands your customer more than anyone (you), and who can communicate to them (us) in a way they’ll understand and in a way that appeals to them.

There’s never been a better time for marketing. Never been a better time to be a partner of Silvermine.