Artificial intelligence has quickly become part of every startup's marketing toolkit. Founders use it to draft websites, write LinkedIn posts, build campaigns and generate ideas in seconds. Yet at at the Venturelab Trainings for Innosuisse, we keep seeing the same pattern: founders turn to AI before they've figured out what they actually want to say. The result is content that sounds polished but feels interchangeable.
Innosuisse trainer Anil Sethi has observed the same development. AI adoption is growing among Swiss startups, although there is still room to catch up.
“This is increasing but is still less than their competitors in Silicon Valley.”
This matters because adoption alone is no longer enough. Using AI is no longer the differentiator. Using it well is.
Conceptual model showing how audience understanding influences the relevance and precision of AI-supported marketing output.
Sources: Salesforce State of Marketing (2026) and Adobe AI and Digital Trends Report (2026).
Your Strategy Shapes Your Prompt
Founders often assume that better prompts will lead to better marketing. In reality, the opposite is usually true. Better strategy leads to better prompts. Before AI can write convincing messaging, founders need to understand exactly who they are talking to, what problem they solve and why customers should care. Without that foundation, even the best language model can only produce generic copy.
As Anil Sethi puts it:
"It's more important to highlight the impact in different market sectors rather than simply improving the quality of the prompt, as this is entirely too inward looking."
That's a useful reminder that positioning comes before communication. AI can help you express a value proposition, but it cannot define one.
Your Customers Are Your Competitive Advantage
Generative AI has access to an enormous amount of information. What it doesn't have is first-hand knowledge of your customers. That still belongs to founders. Customer interviews, sales conversations and product demos reveal frustrations, motivations and buying behaviour that no AI model can infer. Those insights are what turn generic messaging into communication that resonates.
Sethi regularly sees founders overlooking exactly this point.
"Highlight the pain or unaddressed risk or lost revenue of the customer segments… tech startups assume that the entire market is homogeneous."
It's an easy trap to fall into. Many startups describe their market in broad terms when, in reality, their first customers are usually a very specific group with a very specific problem. The clearer that picture becomes, the more useful AI becomes as well.
Let AI Challenge Your Thinking
Most founders use AI to generate content. A more interesting use case is asking it to critique what you've already created. Instead of requesting another version of your website copy or pitch, ask AI to review it as if it were a potential customer. Is the problem obvious? Does the value proposition make sense? What questions remain unanswered? Does the copy focus on product features or customer outcomes?
Used this way, AI becomes less of a copywriter and more of an editor. It helps founders spot weaknesses before customers do.
Good Marketing Still Starts with People
Every new technology promises to change marketing. AI is no exception. But the fundamentals remain remarkably stable. The companies that communicate best are rarely those using the most sophisticated tools. They're the ones that understand their customers best. They know what problems they're solving, how those problems affect people's businesses and why their solution matters. That is also the thread running through Anil Sethi's advice. Strong prompts don't start with clever wording. They start with a clear understanding of the customer.
Where Great Marketing Begins
AI won't invent your positioning, discover customer pain points or define your market. That's still the founder's job. What AI can do is help communicate those insights faster, test different angles and refine messaging across channels. Used that way, it becomes more than a writing tool. It becomes an extension of the founder's thinking. The startups getting the most out of AI aren't producing more content. They're producing more relevant content because they've done the work beforehand. And that's still where great marketing begins.