With what AI can do today, it's a fair bet some founders are asking themselves the same question: why pay an agency when ChatGPT can do it for me.
What AI is actually good at
AI can produce a post, and it can produce one fast. Feed it a topic, a tone, a rough shape, and it gives you back something structurally sound, readable, on brand, technically correct.
For research, for a first draft, for turning scattered thoughts into something with a beginning and an end, it's a useful tool, and pretending otherwise wouldn’t be fair.
But is that all you need from it?
The blind spot
Here's the thing AI can't do. It can't step back and notice what you can't see about yourself. Give it ten opinions and ask which one to post, and it'll just pick one. It won't catch that you said the opposite thing three weeks ago. It won't notice you've made the same point four times without realizing it. It won't tell you the actually good line is buried in your second paragraph while your headline plays it safe.
And unless you hand it your last fifty posts yourself, it has no idea what you've even been saying for a while.
But you know who can do all of that? A human.
What a person gives you instead
Someone who's actually spent time with you can catch things you can't catch about yourself. They notice you keep circling back to the same point without ever saying it outright. They'll tell you, straight up, that you've said this before already.
And there's a kind of thinking you only get to when you're talking to someone who can push back on the spot. You say something half-formed, they ask you one good question about it, and suddenly you're saying something sharper than anything you would've typed alone. A prompt box can't do that. It won't ask why you believe what you just wrote. It won't notice your voice change the moment you start talking about the thing you'd rather not talk about.
A conversation catches all of that. And most of the time, that's where the good stuff actually comes from.
Pay attention to what you're paying for
If all you're getting is a written post, sure, AI can do that for you. No argument there.
But if you're getting mentoring, someone to test a claim before you publish it, PR opportunities that only come from another person's network, or the kind of conversation that pulls out the thing you didn't even realize you were avoiding saying, none of that comes out of a prompt box.
Writing the post was never the hard part. Knowing what to say, and having someone in your corner who'll tell you when you haven't quite said it yet, that's what you should actually be paying for.
By Romy Abdallah