The most effective ad teams right now are a human plus an AI, and no AI tool on the market is good enough to take the human out of the loop. Yes, I run an agency, so I am biased when I say that. It is also true.
If you own a service business, you have probably had the thought. Cancel the agency, hand Google Ads to an AI tool, save the fee. I get it. If I were in your chair I would think it too. About 5% of our clients have tried exactly that. This week, a note from a major economist helps explain why it keeps going badly.
The news: zero financial payoff outside tech
Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, a private equity giant, published a note saying AI has delivered "zero financial payoff" to corporate America outside the tech industry, as reported by TechCrunch, a technology news site.
Slok looked at what he calls the S&P 493: the S&P 500 minus Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. Across those companies, profit margins and revenue per worker appear flat, with no evidence that AI is improving productivity. He is also skeptical this is just a lag, arguing it will be tough for corporate America to turn cheap intelligence into higher revenue growth and higher margins.
Google Ads has been an AI company for over a decade
Here is the part most owners miss. In my experience managing Google Ads for more than ten years, the platform itself has been a machine learning company that whole time. The bidding, the targeting, the matching of searches to ads, all of it already runs on AI.
So when you buy an AI tool and layer it on top of Google Ads, you are putting one AI in charge of another AI. The way I see it, they often compete with each other. One system pushes, the other pulls, and your budget pays for the argument. That is what we saw with the clients who tried to replace us: the tools did not work, and most came back.
Judgment is the job
Slok wrote that "AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment." He added that AI does not understand accountability, trust, culture, unwritten rules, ethical trade-offs or fairness.
That matches what paid ads actually demand. The algorithm does not know that half of last month's leads were tire kickers, or that you make real margin on repipes and lose money on faucet swaps. A human has to feed it that judgment. From managing multiple millions in ad spend as a Google and Meta Partner for over a decade, I can tell you the accounts that win are the ones where a person is steering the machine, every week.
Human plus AI beats both
My bet for the next few years is simple. A human plus an AI outperforms humans working alone, and it also outperforms AI working alone. We use AI heavily inside North Digital, and it makes our team faster. What it cannot do is replace the person who knows your business, your market and your numbers.
I expect plenty more headlines like this Apollo note before the hype cools. Until the day an AI understands why your best month came from one specific campaign and one specific zip code, keep a human in the loop. Right now, that human is the whole difference between AI that pays and AI that just bills.
