AI Tools Advertising Professionals Are Actually Using Right Now

By Joel Comm | A Trusted Voice in a Noisy Tech World

As a New York Times bestselling author who’s navigated 45 years of technology disruption, I’ve watched countless tools promise to revolutionize advertising only to fade into obscurity. The current AI wave follows the familiar pattern of my Disruption Confidence Cycle, but this time the tools actually work. The best advertising professionals aren’t chasing hype anymore. They’re quietly using AI to solve real problems.

The creative directors who rolled their eyes at AI six months ago are now using it to crank out copy variations and brief first drafts. Here's what the sharpest ad teams are doing with AI today.

What's Actually Changing

The creative directors who rolled their eyes at AI six months ago are now using it to crank out copy variations and brief first drafts. Here's what the sharpest ad teams are doing with AI today.

The shift isn't dramatic from the outside. It's not robots replacing people. It's software handling the parts of ai tools advertising professionals are actually using right now that never needed a human in the first place — the data entry, the pattern matching, the first draft of something that always gets rewritten anyway.

Where AI Fits in the Workflow

The most useful AI applications in Advertising aren't the ones that make headlines. They're the ones that save 20 minutes here, an hour there, a day of work compressed into an afternoon.

AI-generated campaign briefs from strategy documents that give creative teams a running start
AI-powered copy variation engines that produce dozens of headline and body copy options for testing
AI tools that analyze competitive advertising and summarize positioning, messaging, and media spend patterns

What's Not Ready Yet

Not everything works. AI still struggles with nuance, context that requires industry experience, and anything that involves building trust with another human. The professionals who are getting the most from AI know exactly where to draw that line.

Getting Started Without the Overwhelm

You don't need to understand how AI works to use it. You need to understand your own workflow well enough to know which parts are worth automating.

Start with the task you dread. The one that takes too long, happens too often, and doesn't actually require your best thinking. That's your entry point.

The Bigger Question

The technology is here. It works. The real question for Advertising Professionals isn't "should we use AI?" It's "how do we start without disrupting what's already working?" That's exactly what Joel addresses in his Future of Work keynote — helping teams navigate AI adoption without the overwhelm.