In 2025, the activity on the Wripple platform made one thing clear: AI is reshaping marketing, and fast. As we start the new year, we wanted to share what we’re seeing from both clients and freelancers: what’s working, what’s holding teams back, and where the biggest opportunities are for independent talent.

Our goal is simple: provide marketing freelancers with actionable insights to seize the upside of AI while navigating the very real challenges it brings.

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What We’re Hearing from Clients

It should come as no surprise that an overwhelming majority of clients asked about AI-related services last year. But adoption is still uneven—especially in enterprise marketing teams, where innovation has to be balanced with risk.

The biggest client concerns about adopting AI we heard again and again were:

• Lack of transparency regarding AI usage
• Generic, low-quality output
• Brand damage (voice drift, off-brand creative)
• IP and confidentiality risk

Industry adoption also varied. On the platform, CPG teams leaned in most aggressively, using AI for both marketing operations and creative development. Most other industries fell in the “interested and experimenting” middle. Financial Services tended to be more cautious, with heavier emphasis on governance and brand/legal safeguards.

Across the briefs we saw, client needs generally fell into four buckets:

• AI creative leadership (setting standards, guiding teams, shaping how AI fits into the creative process)
• Discipline expertise + AI-native execution (e.g., a UX Designer who can incorporate AI tools responsibly)
• AI-led workflow and project management (process design, enablement, repeatable delivery)
• Tool-specific expertise (e.g., Adobe Firefly for content creation)

At the end of the day, most clients were using AI to pursue three outcomes:

• Speed with quality - the most common goal
• Operational leverage - doing more with fewer resources
• Revenue impact - more mature clients tied AI to growth, not just efficiency

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What We’re Hearing from Talent Members

There’s no better way to understand how freelancers are approaching AI than hearing directly from them. Here are a few perspectives from Wripple talent members:

• Social Media Strategist: “I use AI as a helping hand in all aspects of Social Media Strategy, from scheduling to copywriting, a ‘right-hand man’ within the social media world.”
• Designer: “AI’s purpose is not to do all the work. The designer (human) still needs to conceptualize, strategize. AI assists with menial design tasks and exploring/expanding upon an original design idea.”
• Corporate Communications Specialist: “AI is making things more efficient, But it cannot replace relationship building, making judgment calls, managing complex issues, or copywriting with a true voice.”
• Creative Operations Leader: “I integrate AI tools in every step of my workflow while also ensuring originality, transparency, and ethical use.”

Across these conversations, a consistent theme emerges: freelancers are using AI to accelerate research, iteration, and versioning, while keeping strategy, creative direction, narrative, and final accountability firmly human-led. That balance of tech + human judgment is what protects quality and builds trust.

Given these AI observations, here are four recommendations for freelancers to thrive in an AI-first world:

1) Be deliberate—and transparent—about embedding AI into your work. This means getting intentional about where AI helps, and where the human touch matters most.

• Map AI across your workflow: research and discovery, strategy, and production/implementation.
• Define your “human-led” moments: brand voice decisions, creative direction, stakeholder judgment calls, and final QA.
• Be transparent with clients:
  
  • Which tools you use
  • How you manage risk (confidentiality, quality control, and ownership)
  • What your review process looks like (human review, fact-checking, and plagiarism checks when relevant)
  • How AI is addressed in your SOW (disclosure, safeguards, and expectations)

2) Adjust how you sell services, so you meet clients where they are and avoid commoditization. All clients don’t want the same thing from AI. Your sales approach shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all either.

• Adapt your pitch to the client’s AI profile: their needs, maturity, risk appetite, and internal policies.
  
  • AI-mature clients: lead with innovation and acceleration such as overhauled workflows that support productivity and faster experimentation.
  • Middle adopters: lead with pilots + measurable gains that increase speed of key processes and drive repeatability.
  • Risk-averse clients: lead with safety, transparency, and governance-minded initiatives focused on human-led voice and compliance-aware workflow.
• Productize your services with a clear operating model:
  
  • What AI supports  
    
  • What stays human-led  
  • How you manage risk  
• Sell outcomes, not tasks:
  
  • If you’re only selling execution—writing posts, building emails, designing ads—you’re competing with templates, tooling, and lower-cost options. If you sell systems that produce business outcomes—content engines, lifecycle programs, testing plans, reporting loops—you become harder to replace.
    Example: Instead of selling “landing pages,” sell an approach that improves conversion through messaging research, rapid testing, and iterative optimization.

3) Use AI to increase productivity and effectiveness as a business owner. AI isn’t just for client deliverables. It can also upgrade how you run your freelance business.

• Build repeatable workflows so you deliver work faster without sacrificing quality.
  Examples:
  
  • Create reusable prompt libraries, brief templates, and QA checklists for your most common project types
  • Use AI to generate versions (headlines, hooks, design directions) that you then curate and refine
• Boost your own marketing using AI so your pipeline stays warm.
  
  • Turn one strong insight into multiple assets: LinkedIn posts, short newsletter blurbs, a portfolio case study, and outreach angles
  • Use AI to tailor outreach to different verticals while keeping your core positioning consistent
  • Create a simple “content cadence” you can maintain: one post/week, one case study/month, one referral touchpoint/quarter
• Use AI assistants for administrative and operational tasks.
  
  • Draft proposals, scopes, and project plans faster, then tighten them with your expertise
  • Summarize meeting notes into action items, risks, and next steps
  • Create reusable email responses, onboarding checklists, and client status update formats

4) Don’t lose sight of the forest for the (AI) trees. AI can be a huge advantage—but only if you stay grounded in what actually drives growth: results, relationships, and craft.

• Don’t despair—take action.
  Start with a simple AI pilot: a single campaign, a design system experiment, a content workflow test, or a lightweight AI enablement engagement. Small wins build trust—and expand scope naturally.
• Don’t forget to differentiate.
  Over-reliance on AI can create a sea of sameness, especially in creative work. Your edge is still your point of view, taste, and mastery of the craft.
• Don’t over invest in AI for AI’s sake.
  Keep upskilling—but don’t let “learning every tool” replace the fundamentals that drive growth: strong relationships, clear positioning, and consistently high-quality work.

Read more about strengthening company-freelancer collaboration in the AI era.

Clearly, another article was not required to make the point that AI is transforming how marketing work gets done. However, by taking a step back and considering a few observations from 2025, perhaps marketing freelancers can find new ways to expand their opportunities in an AI-led world. The opportunity is real for talent who can combine innovative thinking and speed with judgment, experimentation, and sound governance. Lead with transparency, productize what you do best, and stay relentlessly focused on outcomes. That’s how you stay valuable—no matter how the tools evolve.