There’s a particular flavor of panic in our industry at the moment. It’s the panic of the digital marketer who has been told, repeatedly and loudly, that if they aren’t piping every decision through an LLM by the end of the quarter, they will be replaced by a more obedient colleague who is. The pitch is always the same: AI is thinking now. AI is reasoning. AI is strategizing. Hand the wheel over, sit back, and enjoy a fully optimized, hyper-personalized, infinitely scalable future. Allow me to gently push back, armed with the classic MSPaint.exe. https://cdn.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-05-28_Video_2_high.mp4 There are two problems with the “let the robot decide” school of marketing , and they are mirror images of each other. Where LLMs are weak, they are very stupid in ways that should disqualify them from strategic work.…