Red pill or blue pill: the AI choice most marketing leaders aren’t seeing clearly

Every organisation is talking about AI. Some have built an AI strategy but very few have one that looks at the human side too. In this opening article from `The Red Pill Series', Humari's Joe Hildebrand reveals the fundamental choice marketing leaders face about how they invest in AI - and many are heading in the wrong direction.

There’s a scene in The Matrix where Morpheus offers Neo two pills (hopefully those born after 1999 are still with me at this point). The blue pill lets you stay comfortable, safe inside the world as you’ve always known it, the red pill shows you the truth, which is harder to face but the only path to something real. AI presents the same choice and right now the majority of marketing leaders are reaching for the blue pill.

The blue pill: comfortable, obvious and everywhere

It looks like this: invest in AI tools, automate what you can, drive down costs and prove ROI through efficiency metrics. The Gartner 2025 CMO Spend Survey found that 99% of CMOs consider generative AI a priority (I’m as curious as you are about the other 1%), with the top reported benefits being time efficiency, cost efficiency and content production capacity. It feels like progress but the data tells a very different story.

Where the blue pill actually leads

Whilst 88% of organisations are now using AI in at least one business function, only 26% have moved beyond proof of concept to generate real returns, and just one-third have scaled enterprise-wide. MIT research puts it starkly: 95% of generative AI pilots fail to deliver measurable business impact, not because the technology doesn’t work, but because the people and organisations around it aren’t ready to absorb the change. Most companies are stuck in what’s become known as ‘proof of concept purgatory’, running impressive pilots that never translate into embedded ways of working or ROI because nobody invested in the human conditions required to make them stick.

And the commercial consequences are real. Average AI adopters see $1.41 return for every dollar invested. Top performers see $10.30. That’s an $8.89 gap per dollar, and it isn’t driven by better tools or bigger budgets. BCG research shows that organisations achieving the highest returns follow a 70/20/10 formula: 70% of resources invested in people and processes, 20% in technology and data, 10% in algorithms. Most organisations have this ratio almost completely inverted, which is precisely why the majority are stuck.

The red pill: harder to swallow, but where the real returns live

Taking the red pill means embracing a human-centric approach, because your AI investment will only ever be as good as your people’s readiness to use it. It means choosing to invest in leadership, culture and human capability with the same rigour you bring to your technology stack. It means using AI not as a cost lever but as an opportunity to free your people from the drudgery of the day-to-day, giving them the space to do the creative, strategic and deeply human work that drives growth.

The organisations achieving $10.30 per dollar didn’t get there by automating more, they got there by preparing their people to work alongside AI in ways that create genuine competitive advantage. For marketing leaders, this tension is particularly acute because marketing sits at the intersection of creativity, data and customer understanding, one of the territories where human capability and AI efficiency are competing most directly.

The choice

Every marketing leader reading this is already talking about AI. The question is whether you’re investing in the thing that determines if it works: your people’s readiness to use it well. Over the next four articles, we’ll explore what this looks like in practice, how leaders need to show up in the age of AI, the criticality of psychological safety and experimentation, and what this all means for what marketers care most about: understanding customers.

The blue pill is the obvious choice. The red pill is the better one.