As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in marketing workflows, organizations are facing a more nuanced challenge than simply deciding whether to adopt the technology. Teams also need to understand where AI can meaningfully accelerate their work, where additional scrutiny is required, and which decisions still depend on human experience and judgment.
That balance is the focus of a recent Senior Executive CMO Think Tank article, “How to Balance AI Fluency With Human Insight in Marketing Teams,” published October 14, 2026. The feature brings together marketing and business leaders to examine how organizations can build stronger AI capabilities without weakening the critical thinking, creativity, and customer understanding that effective marketing requires.
Among the contributors is Erin Lentz, Executive Director of Design at ArtVersion, who discusses the importance of giving teams practical opportunities to work with AI while establishing clear expectations around how its output is evaluated.
Lentz recommends beginning with lower-risk applications such as research, ideation, and analysis, while asking teams to verify information, recognize assumptions, and explain the reasoning behind their decisions. Her perspective places AI fluency within the broader discipline of professional judgment rather than treating it purely as a technical capability.
She also emphasizes the importance of organizational guardrails around areas including privacy, bias, intellectual property, and disclosure, with people remaining accountable for the final work that reaches customers and audiences.
As Lentz puts it, organizations should “reward curiosity without rewarding blind adoption.”
That distinction is increasingly relevant as AI tools become easier to access and more deeply integrated into everyday creative and marketing processes. Familiarity with the technology can improve efficiency, expand the range of ideas teams can explore, and support faster analysis. The ability to determine whether an output is accurate, appropriate, original, and aligned with a brand still depends on people who understand the larger context in which the work will live.
“Establish clear standards for privacy, bias, intellectual property and disclosure, with human accountability for every final output,” Erin Lentz — Executive Director of Design
The broader Senior Executive discussion reflects a similar theme. Contributors advocate using real projects as a training ground, comparing AI-generated work with human revisions, preserving opportunities for independent thinking, and measuring AI by the quality of decisions it improves rather than simply how frequently it is used.
For creative and marketing organizations, this creates an important responsibility. As tools become more capable, teams need room to experiment with them, but they also need the experience and standards required to challenge what those tools produce.
Lentz’s contribution reflects an approach ArtVersion continues to bring to emerging technology: exploring where AI can strengthen research, creative thinking, and workflows while keeping human judgment closely connected to the decisions that shape the final experience.
The full discussion appears in Senior Executive’s CMO Think Tank feature, “How to Balance AI Fluency With Human Insight in Marketing Teams.”