Financial services marketers: Your AI needs a core engine.

As heads of a digital agency and a consultancy focused on the financial services sector, we can tell you the marketers we speak with are ... underwhelmed, so far.

AI continues to advance. How about your results?

Every day brings a torrent of AI news. Faster models. Smarter outputs. Continual "revolutionary" breakthroughs. But inside most financial services marketing teams, the results look familiar – depressingly so.

The latest AI breakthrough on its own won't change your results.

The headlines are hard to ignore. Every new AI model release feels like a step change: More capability! More autonomy! More, more, more. But for most financial services marketers, nothing materially changes.

In financial services marketing, AI isn't the hard part.

AI has made content generation easy. Need an article? A campaign? A set of emails? You can produce it in minutes. That's not where teams are getting stuck. The real challenge is everything else.

Maybe your AI is working – but everything else isn't.

If your AI outputs feel off, it's easy to blame the model. The content isn't quite right. The tone feels generic. The message doesn't land. So you tweak the prompt. Try a different tool. Test another model. But the issue usually isn't the AI.

The real AI problem financial services marketers need to solve.

Most conversations about AI focus on AI capability. What models can do. How fast they're improving. What new features are emerging. But that's not what's holding teams back. The real problem is connection.