The short, and long answer, is No.

If the agency or person who handles your Google Ads Account is worried about AI displacing them, you need to look for someone else to manage your accounts.

Google already has fully automated (AI) accounts, and those who have utilized them, O2 Consulting included, have found the long term performance underwhelming.

Although you may see an initial bump in performance utilizing a Google Pmax Campaign, it will peak and then start to decline. There are a number of reasons why this happens (watch for follow up posts).

Pmax is not all bad, and should be part of the mix in any Google Ads Campaign, but it should not be the entirety of it

Even if you assume that the technology exists that would enable AI to outperform a well managed Google Ads Campaign, there is another issue.

PMax is a blackbox, with user controls limited to product feeds and some placements (you can have negative keyword lists manually added, but that’s a different subject for a different post)

To assume that automated Google Ads Campaigns provide the highest ROI, you would also need to assume that Googles objectives are the same as it's advertisers.

The reality is they are not. Advertisers primary concern is ROI. Googles priority is collecting as much revenue from ads as possible, and these goals often do not align

Which is why they Google Performance Max Ad Campaigns try to jam as many placements on low performing mobile display ads as possible.

Even if Google and its customers objectives were aligned, relying solely on automated campaigns would still not be optimal.

Google's current automated campaigns have several limitations, one of the major ones being their inability to effectively prospect for new customers. Despite the fact that AI is capable of detecting historical patterns and using them to attract new customers, this does not happen in practice.

Initially, Google's automated campaigns do show some success by targeting customers who have already shown an interest in the brand or website through re-marketing. However, over time, the performance of these campaigns and existing leads decline, resulting in underutilized budgets.

Interestingly, this lack of performance in the long run is detrimental to Google's revenue. Although they would likely improve their technology if they could, for the time being, it seems that they are unable to do so.

Another issue with Performance Max Google Ads are that they are very slow to pivot away from things that aren’t working. If one of your products is costing you thousands of dollars, with no sales, Performance Max will keep throwing your money at it, whereas an actively managed campaign can pivot to use your resources more efficiently.

There are other issues with solely relying on Performance Max, but just wanted to mention one more. While you can add a negative keyword list to performance campaigns (via request to a Google Rep), with Performance Max, there is no way of knowing which keywords are performing and which are not. So there is no way to build an effective negative keyword list.

But Google Performance Max Ads aren’t all bad, we have found a way to successfully integrate it as part of a broader Google Ads strategy.