Marketing has always been about leverage—about finding ways to multiply effort, amplify reach, and make creativity work harder than the resources behind it. In the past, that leverage came from media, from distribution, from data. Today, it comes from something far simpler and far more powerful: artificial intelligence.

The truth is that we now have a technology that can 10x nearly everything we do. Campaign planning, keyword research, headline testing, content development, customer analysis, training modules—the entire knowledge base of marketing work can be multiplied almost instantly. And it doesn’t cost millions of dollars or require a massive enterprise rollout. For roughly the price of a streaming subscription, per user, per month, every marketer on your team can have access to an assistant that generates ideas faster, produces more options, and frees up the mental space required to do the real work of strategy.

This is not hyperbole. It’s a new baseline reality. The scale of possibility is staggering, but what’s even more staggering is how quickly many marketers have defaulted to the wrong frame for thinking about it. Too much of the conversation around AI has been about efficiency—about cost savings, headcount reductions, and overhead. And while efficiency will always be part of the story, to stop there is to miss the point entirely.

Because the real opportunity isn’t subtraction. It’s multiplication. AI gives us a way not just to cut what doesn’t matter, but to scale what does. It allows us to try more, test more, learn more, and create more, in a fraction of the time it once took. In the hands of forward-thinking marketers, AI becomes a performance amplifier—a tool that doesn’t just save money but unlocks new forms of value.

Ethan Mollick, the Wharton professor who has quickly become one of the most trusted voices in this space, put it clearly: “Misguided companies will see any increase in performance from AI as an excuse to lay off staff, keeping their output the same. More forward-thinking firms will take advantage of these new capabilities to both improve the lives of their employees and expand their own capabilities.” In other words, the companies that mistake AI for a cost-cutting tool will see little more than temporary gains. The ones that treat it as a growth engine will change the competitive landscape of their industries.

So the question for marketers isn’t whether to use AI—we’re past that. The question is how to use it. Not as a way to do less, but as a way to do more. Not as a way to trim, but as a way to expand. Imagine multiplying the speed of your creative process, the depth of your research, the sharpness of your insights. Imagine a marketing department that can generate ten times the possibilities, and then spend its human energy deciding which possibilities are worth pursuing.

That’s the 10x advantage. It’s here. It’s available. And it belongs to the marketers who choose to embrace it not as a shortcut, but as a way to push further, faster, and with more imagination than ever before.