AI is no longer just a future trend in PPC—it’s now a key part of every marketer’s toolkit. In this week’s PPCChat, PPC professionals discussed how they’re building their AI skills, the tools they’re using to understand customer data better, and the platforms that help them create more effective ads in less time.
Q1. Are you seeing where your company is hiring fewer junior PPC people right now? This is a trend we see emerging from our salary survey, and people are noticing it within their own firms.
This is unchanged in our company right now. @beyondthepaid
I’m a company of one so this doesn’t affect me. @Pete_Bowen
Interesting answers so far,..We are small, but I def think about getting someone with a big more experience as our next hire @duanebrown
I’ve heard mixed things from agencies. A lot are nearshoring junior talent (hiring in South America while serving North America), some pressure from clients to AI everything and save money. But many agencies still have their “college graduate programs” the same as they have. @Aaronlevy
I moved from an agency model with a full team to solo practice and working with a few contractors from time to time. But for the work that I would have hired for in the past, and or onboarded another person to work on specific areas or contractual basis – I am not, and the first question in my head is can I automate this…. There are limitations and pros and cons for the approach. The most irreversible thing to automate with LLMs is PPC and anything to do with money with real consequences – can’t do that – not now – not probably ever. Functions like reporting and stuff – the surrounding parts of research etc – can do that with LLMs. Money spent is gone – irreversible – anything that’s irreversible – no LLM @alimehdimukadam
Interesting @Aaronlevy….I hear Mexico is also a popular option for near-shoring a team. @duanebrown
I do have an offshore team in Eastern Europe and there are NO plans to change that. @beyondthepaid
@alimehdimukadam What made you want to go back to being solo? @duanebrown
I work with a US client who has a marketing team based in Mexico. They’re a pretty smart bunch. @Pete_Bowen
Mexico City is popular for it, but weird to me bc cost of living isn’t much different. But hearing lots of Argentina/Chile. heck white shark used to be (maybe still is???) all Nicaragua. @Aaronlevy
@beyondthepaid Hopefully you get to go visit them and get some work travel time! @duanebrown
We haven’t made any changes yet – I still feel like the agency model is predicated on a lot of juniors and then up and out, but we also tend to go more senior than junior, just as a company @revaminkoff
I just did Mexico City for the first time in Feb and had a blast. Been to a few spots in South America, but I need to see more of that and Central America. @duanebrown
However, we’ve been having this as an existential debate – whether AI means that there should be fewer juniors @revaminkoff
@revaminkoff BUT THEN WHERE DO SENIORS COME FROM!?!?!? (all caps for extra existentialism) @Aaronlevy
This question came as a big theme from our PPC Salary Survey on Reddit is that it seems like we keep having less and less Junior people enter the industry as whole each year. That will hurt us in 5 years…https://www.reddit.com/r/PPC/comments/1rw66wi/ppc_salary_survey_2026_final_report_11th_year/ @duanebrown
Good question. @Pete_Bowen
I frankly hate the thought of eliminating junior roles for AI. It’s icky and bodes poorly for the future. @beyondthepaid
I agree- and you have to understand the fundamentals as a junior to be able to check/use the AI @revaminkoff
@duanebrown was life throwing curve balls my way – burned out and down with health issues and then moved to a new country coz my wife wanted to, etc. had a choice of pushing the accelerator hard or recalibrating for the time being. @alimehdimukadam
To me it’s a reframe of training – imo it’s still important to teach button pushing largely so they know what the buttons do and why. thennnn they get super powered run everything, magical robot. challenge is there’s less buttons to push…. so what do you teach?!? @Aaronlevy
I told an intern that I would rather have his perspective then him handing over outputs, I cannot teach him if he is not putting together the thoughts. @Chriskostecki
You teach marketing. The fundamentals haven’t changed @beyondthepaid
@alimehdimukadam Taking care of your health is important. @duanebrown
@beyondthepaid Agree 100% – which is why I don’t put as much weight on AI. @revaminkoff
Yeah, my thought is – the whole AI & LLMs is hype train on one end and doom train on another. And because news cycles and content consumption is algorithmically driven for everyone. It’s getting amplified. The truth is somewhere in the middle Gemini, Claude, OpenAI – they are like auto manufacturers and will keep releasing new cars and faster cars etc. The skill to learn is – how to drive
And it doesn’t need learning how combustion engines work. The gap is – you can’t learn how to drive in a real environment – coz that will lead to crash, loss, etc. But the mental frame should be the skill is learning how to drive without being an automobile engineer or a mechanic. @alimehdimukadam
Great analogy @beyondthepaid
The last 2 agencies I’ve been with have opted to outsource to the Philippines and Mexico instead of hiring Juniors in-country. Not a fan of this. @williamhboggs
Dang. If there isn’t a pathway from junior>senior then the industry is in trouble. Kind of like the population collapse in countries like Japan. @robert_brady
Q2. What one skill are you focusing on to upskill right now? (The next few questions will dig into the tools we are using too… outside ChatGPT)
Using AI to make ad creative clients like and for those who don’t have a designer in-house/on staff @duanebrown
process design and delegation. @Aaronlevy
Using Claude Code training it over time to bring in data accurately. @AmberDeedler
prompting is just delegation. if you suck at delegation….. well………..(ok that’s two skills but they fit together) @duanebrown are you doing more “create from scratch” or more “modify existing designs they already have?” @Aaronlevy
maintain momentum, how to scale, building a bootstrap agency from the ground up (for real this time) @Chriskostecki
I’m trying to learn deep work again. I’m old enough to remember sitting down at my desk and working all day then going home. I want to get back to that instead of sitting down at my desk and checking email, x, slack 100 times a day @Pete_Bowen
@Aaronlevy Make from scratch based on the photos images they already have on the site and or in the shopping feed. @duanebrown
systems and change management, also project management, people management, and charging what I’m worth @revaminkoff
@Pete_Bowen I don’t have many apps on my phone has helped me do deeper work. Less reasons to check my phone at my desk @duanebrown
How to let LLMs not break stuff and do only what’s asked. Had to learn a whole lot of GitHub and Git Stuff and engineering but turns out it’s not really needed. @alimehdimukadam
@duanebrown I’m trying to leave my phone downstairs before going up to the office. Half the job is training wifey not to send me cute grandkid pictures during the day @Pete_Bowen
@Pete_Bowen highly recommend going notification free as best as you can – email/slack/text just act too much like servant bells before long. @Aaronlevy
I have all notifications turned off on all my devices. Been going 12 years strong no this method. Helps a ton! @duanebrown
Yeah, I remember at one point of time the slack notification sound would trigger a reflex action in me – not anxiety but the feeling of – now what happened @alimehdimukadam
just gotta tell my clients to stop chatting me. @Chriskostecki
I want to get better knowledge of Server-Side tracking! I’m a pro with client-side, but haven’t had an opportunity to mess with Server-Side @williamhboggs
For server side tracking – Cloudflare Zaraz is the one – it’s free and you can test it on your own site with GTM containers @alimehdimukadam
Q3. AI x Customer Data / Insights: Are you using AI tools to help dig into customer data? I know Shopify has Sidekick built into their platform.
We still have many clients who don’t allow us to use AI on their data @beyondthepaid
@beyondthepaid Is their concern privacy related or other people accidentally gettig access to the data? @duanebrown
Yes. No concerns from client side – already mentioned as part of the agreements as long as no PII is shared without approvals @alimehdimukadam
I’m still concerned about privacy / things accidentally becoming public as the LLMs are “trained” @revaminkoff
Both concerns – privacy and the data getting out there @beyondthepaid
@revaminkoff it’s trained already but the firms have guardrails now and toggles even for B2C and especially for B2B. That’s what got Anthropic to shoot up in revenue @alimehdimukadam
Some clients don’t even allow meeting recordings. @beyondthepaid
I’m seriously thinking of extracting my call tracking software (does the same as CallRail etc) into a SaaS that promises that no AI will ever listen to a call @Pete_Bowen
We also have clients who are cautious about releasing customer data to ad platforms and AI. @ynotweb
IF ONLY THERE WAS A TOOL WITH DECADES OF BRAINS BEHIND IT THAT NOW HAS AI FOR A BRAIN AND ASSEMBLER HMMMMMMMMMMMMM @Aaronlevy
I always use AI tools with anonymized data. You can even run your own local embeddings service so you give the AI embeddings instead of search terms, which you can translate back into search terms. Much like using email hashes lets you share data with Google, Meta, etc.@DanThies
I anonymized a report once and Claude figured out which client it was. That was the end of me trusting anonymizing @beyondthepaid
Anonymizing is the best way. @ynotweb
But tbh not hearing a lot of it outside of people being a bit reckless with their data (as others mentioned above) or iffy prompts. if people ask for “find my best customers” then it’s just like uhhhh here’s someone who bought the most. most ppl in secure industries I’ve spoken with use Copilot because of guardrails. @Aaronlevy
Yeah, the concern should be the same as using a Shopify and or email automation or any other platform wrt to data privacy. The only toggle is will you train on my data. The answer today by default is no for paid customers. And yes for free customers with an option to toggle it off @alimehdimukadam
If you are ecom, I think Shopify’s Sidebar inside the admin panel is pretty good. Good place to start with clients, I would say. @beyondthepaid That is a little much… recording a meeting seems so stanard @duanebrown
@duanebrown @beyondthepaid We have some clients concerned about meeting recording too. We had to confirm that our recording software was safe and wouldn’t share any of their data, etc. @revaminkoff
We work with a lot of cybersecurity and financial services clients. They are very protective of EVERYTHING @beyondthepaid
We have an “AI Brain” that pulls in data from ad accounts, meeting notes, ahrefs, and more and combines it all to give updates. It’s frequently wrong, so I’m not a fan of it. Management using it to assess our performance when it’s so often inaccurate is very frustrating and I feel like it has actually created a communication gap rather than a bridge.@williamhboggs
I’m an advocate of AI. I happily pay for a premium claude account out of my own pocket. But you have to know when to use AI and when to use real people. AI doesn’t understand nuances. @williamhboggs
Exactly @williamhboggs . We use AI too. I love it for many things. But it doesn’t understand nuance and needs to be monitored & checked @beyondthepaid
For most of what we do – almost everything – a local model works just as well. @DanThies
Q4. AI x Reporting: Are you using any AI tools to help with reporting to your bosses/clients?
See my response in the previous Q. Probably fits this better. @williamhboggs
We have not used AI here…. I think this is the last place we would AI in the agency. Human Insights is worth a lot. @duanebrown
fwiw, most AI reports that write insights for you are not particularly, uh, insightful. OH CTR DOWN BECAUSE IMPRESSIONS UP isn’t helpful. Funny enough, I was demoing Google’s Ask Advisor for a piece, and it went WAY more thorough (almost too thorough) and started pulling competitors’ earnings reports. edit: last I checked you can ask it to make pancakes. @Aaronlevy
They’re getting much better in terms of data assembly, but the actual thinking part is still best left for people. We (optmyzr) try to piece stuff together in reporting by looking at change history, but it gets messy in a hurry. imo it’s gonna be a LONG time until one of these things can actually write insightful reports @Aaronlevy
@Aaronlevy Good… means I have a job for a few more years. @duanebrown
I’m sure it’ll get there, but for now asking it to look at THE WORLD and explain it….. well, tokens ain’t cheap haha. @Aaronlevy
Only for gathering reports and data – built my own by stitching scripts – won’t call it AI
It’s automation for most part that will do a daily and weekly run. Nothing an Excel sheet can’t do (by people who write macros and build dashboards in Excel). A lot of AI is also just automation on steroids that can speak English instead of code. @alimehdimukadam
Q5. AI x Ads: What AI tools, apps, or sites are you using to help create ads right now? This can apply to paid social or Google’s Demand Gen…ect.
Have found gemini the best llm in terms of creating images, but not using any 3rd party platforms at the moment. @Aaronlevy
At GML Google talked about Pomelli (https://labs.google.com/u/0/pomelli/). We are playing around with that and see how it does vs Nano Banana @duanebrown
I built a Skill in Claude to iterate on Ad ideas and Ad Copy in the way I would normally approach it myself. It’s great when you give it specific instructions and guardrails. Poor when you let it run wild. @williamhboggs
Wild and free…@duanebrown
I have an API integration with ChatGPT that helps build ad briefs, then turns those ad briefs into ad and landing page copy by following the same rules I used when doing it manually. The output is pretty good, but I always polish it by hand. @Pete_Bowen
We’ve pulled back a lot on AI tools for creatives except for brainstorming and basics. Many clients have tightened the reins, and I don’t blame them- we were always replacing portions of images with better photography and found too much repetition in verbiage. @ynotweb
Q6. AI x Whatever: Any cool use cases for AI we haven’t discussed?
One of my favorite uses is something completely boring. One of my clients gets leads from about 15 different sources. The only common thing with those leads is that they come in by email. Every email has a slightly different format, and we used to parse them using Zapier but that would break about once a week. Over the last two years or so, I’ve been using OpenAI to read those emails and return structured data: first name, last name, email, phone, and so on, so that it can be put into the lead management system. @Pete_Bowen
1: ask it to do your job for you without training an agent (write a response to this in the tone of (@Aaronlevy) 2: get frustrated at it because it’s really bad at writing jokes, write commentary anyway and realize i wasted time 3: get mad at it, ask it “what is aaron levy’s general tone” and it says “professionalism with light snark” 4: design whiskey label. @Aaronlevy
I love it for project management, personally. It uses the Jira CLI to read, create, update work items. I use it as a central hub for any info I need, then it can write comments, tagging stakeholders for more info or send Slack Messages on the back of them. I just have it draft things before confirming. @Charles bannister
AI is amazing for summarizing next steps from meetings and for meeting notes in general. @beyondthepaid,
We at Optmyzr have cowork connected to basically our whole org. so outside of PPC, it makes assembling things from a variety of sources way, way, wayyyyyy easier. @Aaronlevy
You’ll always be the Tony Stark. And Jarvis will be your assistant. There is no Iron Man without Tony Stark, and can’t be. So AI is amplify human intelligence coz anything that’s artificial – can’t be intelligent in my opinion from a biology and evolution, life and cells viewpoint. Silicon and Amoeba. Two different things. @alimehdimukadam
It also takes a list of bullet points and makes them into a nice client facing doc. @beyondthepaid
@alimehdimukadam I always say our sidekick is alfred (from batman) – I have problem to solve, here is what I want to do. sidekick responds (ideally in cheeky michael caine accent): IVE GOT JUST THE THING. @Aaronlevy
I am mostly leaning towards Donna. One of the prompts was you are Alfred, Donna, Jarvis combined for one of the Hermes profiles. @alimehdimukadam
My favorite use cases are reorganizing data and dumbing things down (not saying that to be snarky, its just difficult for me to do so its nice to have a way to change communication styles) @ynotweb
yes – simplifying language, making it more concise. @beyondthepaid
I’ve used it to write better JS Scripts fro cJS Variables to track more info on my conversion actions in GTM. I know enough JS to understand and proof what it’s doing, but not enough to write it myself without getting a headache haha. I’ve tested them and I’m compiling them into a free github repo anyone can grab them from and use to their advantage. I’ll post the link in #scripts @williamhboggs
echo @ynotweb i try not to use it to write for me (despite anecdote above) but having it review my writing for clarity, having it represent a skeptical reader and poke holes etc. is amazing @Aaronlevy
@ynotweb 10000% on dumbing things down. “explain it to me like I’m a golden retreiver” @Charles bannister
AI responds: SQUIRREL! @Aaronlevy
I am building a simulator and a platform for this to help other working non-tech people understand the nuances. Building on the driving school and flight simulator analogy. Started as a side project, but turned out it can help a lot of people who can’t figure out what’s hype and what’s not. @alimehdimukadam
Would love to share when ready with folks who might want to try and also collaborate and shape it. All feedback good or bad would be welcome. And yes I’ll track your prompts and strip PII. So disclaimer @alimehdimukadam
love this idea @Aaronlevy
Krisp for call notes has been a lifesaver. @Chriskostecki
PPCChat Participants
- Melissa L Mackey @beyondthepaid
- Chris Kostecki @Chriskostecki
- Reva Minkoff @revaminkoff
- Boggs @williamhboggs
- Peter Bowen @Pete_Bowen
- Duane Brown @duanebrown
- Aaron Levy @Aaronlevy
- Ali Mehdi Mukadam @alimehdimukadam
- Robert Brady @robert_brady
- Amber Deedler @AmberDeedler
- Kammy Caruss @ynotweb
- Dan Thies @DanThies
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