An audit of where AI actually helps,
and where it would quietly make things worse
AI gets pitched for every marketing task right now, and some of that is genuinely useful and some of it would quietly make your numbers worse. We audit your actual operations and tell you specifically where AI helps, where it should stay human, and what guard has to exist before anything automated touches real budget or a real customer.
Where the money leaks today
The current pressure to “use AI in marketing” pushes teams toward automating tasks by enthusiasm rather than by risk assessment, and the failure mode is not usually dramatic, it is quiet: an AI-drafted report that confidently states a wrong number, a content pipeline that drifts off-brand after the person who set it up stops reviewing it closely, a chatbot that makes a claim about pricing or availability that is not actually true.
We have built and audited our own AI systems with exactly this risk in mind. An AI analyst we built to answer business questions over a live database was given a read-only role with a guarded SQL layer, one query at a time, forced limits, no write access, and we still found and closed eight separate bypasses in our own guard before trusting it with real customer data. That discipline, assume the automation will be pushed somewhere it should not go and check for it directly, is the same discipline this audit applies to a client’s marketing operations.
What we do
We walk through your real marketing operations, content production, reporting, segmentation, customer messaging, and give a specific recommendation for each task: fully automate, AI-assist with a human review step, or keep entirely human, based on the actual risk if it goes wrong, not on how impressive automating it would look. Anything touching budget, pricing, or a claim made to a customer gets a specific guard requirement attached, since that is where an unreviewed automation causes real damage fastest.
If you already have AI tools or workflows in production, we audit them the same way we audit our own: looking specifically for the bypass, the edge case, the prompt that gets the system to do something it should not, rather than assuming the vendor’s claims about safety are sufficient. The output is a phased rollout plan ranked by safety and expected time saved, so the safest, highest-value automations happen first.
What we need from you
A walkthrough of your current marketing operations and anything already automated or AI-assisted, plus honest access to past incidents, a bad AI-generated post, a reporting mistake, since that history is the fastest route to finding the real risk.
How we measure
Whether the phased rollout, once implemented, actually avoids the failure modes the audit flagged, checked a month or two after rollout against the specific guards recommended.
Price and timeline
| Option | Price | What it covers | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Launch or audit | from $800 | Full task-by-task review and phased rollout plan | 1 to 2 weeks |
| Monthly management | from $500 / month | Ongoing guard review as new AI tools or tasks get added | monthly, no lock-in |
| Full control, handover to your team | from $1,800 | Full guard framework and documentation for your team to maintain | 2 to 3 weeks |
Related
This audit pairs with a marketing automation audit and a marketing stack audit. The full build is on the analytics service page. For a specific automated layer with guards already built in, see dashboard commentary on the automations catalogue. Real examples: the two-brand analytics hub with its own AI analyst and the trading app funnel audit.
Using AI somewhere in marketing and not sure what guard is actually protecting you? Get in touch and we will look at what is live today.
FAQ
How much does an AI marketing audit cost?
From $800 for a full review of your marketing operations with a task-by-task recommendation and a phased rollout plan, delivered in 1 to 2 weeks.
Will the audit just tell us to automate everything?
No. A real audit finds tasks that should stay human, pricing decisions, sensitive customer communication, anything with real reputational risk, as clearly as it finds tasks safe to automate. We say so directly either way.
We already use some AI tools. Can you audit what we have?
Yes, and that is often the most valuable part, checking an AI tool or workflow already in production for guard gaps nobody has looked for since it was first set up.
What do you need from us?
A walkthrough of your current marketing operations, including anything already automated or AI-assisted, and honest access to where things have gone wrong before, a bad piece of AI-generated content, a reporting error, since that history points straight at the risk.
How do you report findings?
A task-by-task recommendation, automate, assist, or keep human, with the specific guard needed for anything in the first two categories, ranked into a phased rollout plan rather than an all-at-once recommendation.