It’s 2026. Do we actually need copywriters?

As a copywriter, I may be slightly biased on this one, but here goes.

Now that AI tools can seemingly do all our writing for us before we’ve even opened the brief, copywriters have a more vital role to play than ever. We help make sure humanity (and sense) stay at the heart of the way brands communicate.

The first thing to say is that copywriters aren’t just there to add the words at the end. In an agency, most problems don’t arrive neatly labelled as copy problems or design problems. They arrive as messy, half-formed business problems that need turning into something people can act on.

AI can give you solid parenting advice, but it’s less useful when the problem doesn’t know what shape it wants to be yet. And that’s not just true of big idea campaigns. It’s true of pretty much everything.

Need a newsletter? Well you can just pop all the info in your favourite AI friend and it’ll give you something that skips from one side of your brain to the other. But it won’t give it a reason to exist. And consumer brains are very good at detecting when something doesn’t have a reason to exist. 

Need a social post? Then it’s even more important that it doesn’t feel like it was written by a robot, because who wants a fake human talking to them while they doomscroll on the toilet?

Which then brings us to whether we (as humans) are good judges of our own AI output. A quick scan of advertising word-based output in the modern world would suggest not. 

There are plenty of headlines, body copy, slogans and other pieces of brand language which, if you look closely, sound like they make sense, but are just the right-sounding relevant words stuck together in rhythmic blocks.

Next time you read anything that’s more than a few words long, look out for this - a sentence that ends in a three-part list. For example: ’By the end of this article I hope you will have a broader understanding of why copywriters are useful, necessary and indispensable.’ 

It sounds good, doesn’t it? The rhythm plops you from the beginning of the sentence to the end, without ever sounding less than confident, assured and assertive. But if you look at those three words, the middle one so often means the same as one of the other two. It’s fluff, and nobody ever notices. This used to be the preserve of political speech writers (and still is), but now it’s everywhere. 

Is this terrible? Probably not. But it does show how hard it can be to filter what you’ve run through the AI sausage machine. 

Have you ever had a business idea and asked ChatGPT if it could work/change the world? It’s quite an experience. First you’ll be told you’re onto something, then you’ll do some collaborative honing of the idea, then you’ll figure out what the launch will look like, and before you know it, you’re betting the farm on a range of chocolate hairdryers. 

We all love our own ideas in the same way we all love our own copy, even if something else has written it for us. But objectivity is baked into the job of a copywriter. We need to be able to see everything we write from as many angles as possible. And it matters if it’s wrong. It matters if it doesn’t connect. We don’t just power down until the next prompt, we get nagged by our own annoyingly human minds if it’s not quite right.

Do copywriters use AI? Yes indeed. But personally, in the following order: brain first, tool second. AI is excellent for ordering and compiling information, but the brain bit is (currently) irreplaceable. 

That’s where the sense-checking happens, and, crucially, the spark that resonates with another brain. A lived experience that is very niche but feels universal. A feeling that you had and you weren’t sure if it was just you. Then you see it written down in some form, and a connection is formed.  

Am I romanticising the extent to which this is the case? Well one of our clients makes (exquisite) toilets, and I can assure you the same rules apply when talking about flushing technology.

So we’re here and we’re more important than ever, reaching a human hand out from ads, brochures, posts, newsletters, window displays and anything else that comes across our desks. Make no mistake, copywriting is living, breathing and thriving. 

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