There has been a recent outpouring of articles in digital marketing trade publications and websites which discuss the future of the industry in the context of new tools made available by artificial intelligence. But it bears mentioning that in many cases, the tools referenced in those articles are not really new. Some of them have been features of digital marketing for many years, and although they have all certainly undergone improvements thanks to machine learning, the term “A.I.” is arguably just a buzzword that is being applied to them now in order to expand the discussion surrounding that new category of digital technology.

If you read some of the articles in question, you’ll probably come to realize that “A.I.” often just refers to the latest iteration of traditional algorithms. Writers may try to give the impression that the digital marketing industry is currently being disrupted by things like content recommendation systems, social media automation, improved data analytics and web traffic insights. But anyone who has even casually watched the development of that industry knows that these things have been familiar aspects of user experience online since the 2000s.

Digital marketing firms have had the underlying tools in their toolkit since that time, and if they have been working to remain competitive, then they have been following the growth and development of those same tools, thus learning how to use them more efficiently.

Nothing has fundamentally changed in the past few years about how websites recommend products and other content to known users, or how digital marketing strategists collect and utilize various points of data. Those processes might technically be considered to rest in the hands of A.I. now, but all that means is that machine learning has allowed the old algorithms and apps to be modified and fine-tuned more quickly than before.

Of course, there are some areas in which A.I. has created altogether new tools, or has improved existing tools to such a degree that they arguably don’t fit in quite the same category anymore. A good example of that latter phenomenon is the progress that chat bots have made toward becoming a truly valuable and non-intrusive aspect of UX web design.

If you were a user of AOL Instant Messenger in the early 2000s, you might remember interacting with some of the earliest chat bots. They were an interesting curiosity and a sign of things to come, but it would be almost two decades until A.I. would turn them into something that could provide meaningful information and be useful for digital marketing purposes. Now A.I. chat bots are being used online for customer service more and more often, and people are able to interact with them like never before, almost as if they’re fellow human beings.

Of course, the biggest cultural discussion around A.I. has to do with its brand new capabilities for generating text, audio, and video, potentially displacing human creatives in digital marketing and other industries. But even while digital marketing websites exaggerate the impact of A.I. on longstanding features of the online experience, they tend to acknowledge that A.I. is no replacement for human insights and empathy, and likely never will be.

Digital marketing professionals will certainly have to adopt some of the emerging functionalities of artificial intelligence in order to remain competitive in their field, but those who try to replace traditional human expertise with machine learning will probably end up creating highly derivative products that don’t reflect any sort of design or marketing strategy that is likely to connect with human users. No matter how broadly or narrowly you define the term, A.I. is still just a tool best used by those who already know what they’re doing.