Ever have that aha moment when someone shows you a trick that shortens the time it takes to do a task? Or have a lightbulb go on when someone explained how a tool could do something you never realized it could?
Generative AI presents lots of opportunities for those discoveries. After all, how can you know all it can do, given it gets smarter every day and no one has the time to learn it all?
Sure, you could ask the AI tool, but we brought in some human help. The experts presenting at Content Marketing World share their best advice and tips on incorporating generative AI into your operations. They talk about its partner role, practical applications, strategic implications, and the need to use AI ethically and responsibly.
Prefer to watch, listen, and learn? Check out the videos from Ahava Leibtag, Dale Bertrand, Jim Sterne, and Andrew Davis.
1. Sow the seeds
Who needs which reusable prompts and automations? This is one of the most important questions for marketing leaders today. The answers vary widely across roles and processes. But finding the answers, getting new tools set up, and getting people trained is critical. It’s about quality and performance, not just speed and efficiency.
Strategists, designers, writers, editors, analysts, managers … they all need different prompts, automations, and agents. One evolves into the next.
Two years from now, you’ll look back in amazement that your team didn’t have any digital labor in place. We are still living in the primitive before times. When you evolve is up to you. — Andy Crestodina, co-founder and chief marketing officer, Orbit Media Studios
2. Use what you have; create what you don’t
Start with what’s already in your stack. Many platforms — like HubSpot, Salesforce, or Asana — are already embedding generative AI into their workflows. Test them out on what they can automate for you.
Build your own mini assistants. Use ChatGPT or other AI tools to create custom bots that handle repetitive or time-consuming tasks. — Pam Didner, founder, Relentless Pursuit, LLC
3. Expand your subject knowledge
Content marketing operations offer many opportunities for automation through AI. One of the best ways to make use of current AI models is for deep research on thought leadership topics. Many content marketers are brought in for their writing expertise, but we often lack deep industry knowledge of our audience. If we're going to write a respectable piece that our educated buyers will accept, we need stats, quotes, and real-life case studies.
AI tools with reasoning capabilities and real-time access to the internet can significantly bolster what you write, or at the very least, reduce your time to topic proficiency. You can take these one step further through API automations with tools like Zapier or Make, and set up automatic research reports every day, week, or month on a topic, and create an automated research assistant, like Notion or Monday.com, which can build a database for you in your CRM or WorkOS. — Jack Meeker, content marketing team manager, Healthee
4. Make AI your production assistant
Custom GPTs and AI workflows are amazing for automating the execution work, especially once you've built and documented a repeatable playbook that AI can follow. For example, we're using a custom GPT (and hopefully soon an AI agent) to automate our podcast, newsletter, and online playbook production and publication process. It's such a huge timesaver (and it ensures no steps get missed!).
— Ali Orlando Wert, director of content strategy and brand, Databox
5. Go for custom integration
One of the most impactful ways we’ve integrated generative AI into content marketing operations is by building and calibrating custom GPTs tailored to clients’ content workflows. These models significantly accelerate content production by handling drafting tasks and adapting to brand voice and guidelines. We’ve also found deep research capabilities in tools like ChatGPT invaluable. They dramatically reduce the time needed for pre-production research.
That said, human subject matter expert review and quality assurance remain essential at every stage to ensure accuracy, relevance, and trustworthiness. We continue to examine all marketing operations and processes at our company, with the goal of automating where possible and scaling with AI. — Chad Gilbert, vice president, content marketing, NP Digital
6. Make it an editor and brainstormer
One of the most helpful ways to incorporate generative AI into marketing operations, especially for social media, is by using it as a real-time editor and brainstorming partner. For example, once a brand voice is well-established, AI tools can help fine-tune captions to better match that tone. You can drop in a rough post and ask for edits that make it sound more confident, more playful, or more in line with how your brand actually speaks. It’s like having a second set of (very fast) eyes on your copy.
AI is also incredibly helpful for streamlining repeatable content. Think weekly social posts like rate updates, reminders, or recurring promotions — anything that follows a similar structure week after week. — Ashley Baker, owner, Coastline Marketing LLC
7. Review your standard operating procedures
Look at your marketing operations' standard procedures. Anything that implies “if this happens, then do that” is a prime candidate for automation. Then, within that automation, give any repetitive or single output tasks to AI. Now, you've optimized existing processes while at the same time possibly improving consistency in quality and brand standards.
There are also creative tasks that fall in the good enough category. When productivity is more important than artistic achievement, generative AI tools should be the go-to, even for creative projects. — A. Lee Judge, co-founder and chief marketing officer, Content Monsta
8. Multiply your content versions
Marketing teams focus too much on how to use AI to generate static content. That’s likely to become a race to the bottom as more undifferentiated content hits consumers. The real opportunities come in two places: personalization and speed to market.
In the personalization space, the opportunity is to take high-impact, credible content that delivers real expertise and scale it for each individual by using AI to version everything from the content to the imagery to the calls to action.
From a speed-to-market perspective, AI can be an engine to automate manual processes, streamline reviews, edit for clarity and grammar, generate ideas, test and learn, and connect data, insights, and actions to market better, faster, and with better results. However, while AI is a good tool to help with automating manual processes, a human must be part of the process to ensure that the content is reliable and accurate. — Tiffany Grinstead, vice president, Nationwide
9. Automate for immediate help
Think of generative AI as a powerful assistant for marketing. It can quickly analyze what people are searching for, helping us create better content faster. Plus, it lets us personalize experiences for customers and automate a lot of the data work around campaigns and customer service. While it's a game-changer for efficiency and personalization, we still need humans to guide the strategy and make sure everything feels right and responsible. It's about smart automation freeing us up to be more creative and strategic. — Zack Kadish, SEO analytics lead, Faire
10. Dig into the data
I'm loving AI's ability to analyze large data sets to find relationships between data points that my team previously labored to identify. Autodesk's global State of Design and Make study of nearly 6,000 leaders has limitless permutations of insights by industry and geography, not to mention hours and hours of interviews to dig into. Plugging the transcripts into AI rather than reading and rereading them is obviously a huge improvement. And having a tool to create traffic drivers and other derivative content is also a game-changer. — Stephanie Losee, content leader, Dell, Visa, and Autodesk
11. Sit in the cockpit with you in the captain’s seat
AI should be your copilot, not your autopilot.
The best use of generative AI is scaling the grunt work without sacrificing your brand’s identity — summarizing transcripts, drafting first-pass content outlines, brainstorming creative variants. This sort of stuff is the sweet spot. It helps us accelerate production while keeping humans in charge of resonance, originality, and impact.
Biggest missed opportunity? Using AI to enrich buyer insights, not just content. Feeding AI real buyer behaviors and actions to help us personalize outreach, map journey stages, and surface pipeline/churn risks faster is where AI gets strategic, not just tactical. — Josh Baez, senior manager, demand generation, NetLine
12. Identify the gaps and possibilities; be transparent
There is no limit to how you can use AI, as long as you do it ethically and signal to your audiences that you are using it. We use it for gap analysis (running a stakeholder interview transcript and the finished piece through AI and asking if we missed anything), research (but always double-checking links and facts), and ideation (you'll have to prompt many times). It's a co-pilot and wingman, but I still like to do my research the old-fashioned way, so I can see it and verify it with my own eyes.
— Ahava Leibtag, CEO, Aha Media Group
13. Let AI assume the intern role
AI should do tasks that you can do, but it can do them faster. Think of it like your intern — AI can follow your directions and take on more responsibility with time and success, but it can never replace you. It can also make suggestions, but you are the one who still makes the decisions. — Ruth Carter, evil genius, Geek Law Firm
14. Work together
The most helpful use cases occur when you find the best way to collaborate with AI.
Use AI for the things it's good at: data analysis, ideating, brainstorming, gap analysis, automations, and simulating things like virtual focus groups, user behavior, and content performance.
And you are the expert guide, providing the right input, adding the human elements, emotion, storytelling, and perspective. Our expertise is critical in creating the best input and validating and judging the most effective output. — Brian Piper, owner and consultant, Brian W Piper LLC
15. Augment your intelligence
The AI game changer isn't replacing you or your team; it's creating your digital doppelgängers — your AI-powered creative collaborator. Don't just generate generic content. Build specialized agents that enhance your unique talents and amplify your brand voice. That's not just AI. That's intelligence augmentation. — Andrew Davis, author, The Loyalty Loop
16. Spark better decision-making
The most helpful way to integrate generative AI into marketing isn’t to go faster — it’s to think better. AI’s real value isn’t in churning out more content, but in slowing down the decision process just enough to spark better ones. When used well, AI becomes a thinking partner: stress-testing ideas, mapping options, surfacing patterns you might miss in the rush.
This isn’t about automation; it’s about augmentation. The smart playbook is to embed AI into the strategic layers of content operations: tagging frameworks, content modeling, and journey orchestration. Done right, it helps marketing teams move with more clarity, not just speed.
And the biggest opportunity? Using AI to bring back the kind of friction that creates value — the intentional pause, the helpful what if, the reframed narrative. That’s where better marketing lives — not in the output but in the choices you make before you ever hit publish. — Robert Rose, chief troublemaker, Seventh Bear
17. Brainstorm ideas
Ideation is the best and fastest way to get started with generative AI because it embraces hallucinations instead of you working overtime to make it accurate and deterministic. — Jim Sterne, president, Target Marketing of Santa Barbara
18. Build the visuals
Like most marketers, you're probably using AI to generate content. But don't forget about AI image generation. Tools like ChatGPT and Ideogram in Canvas Magic Studio help you brainstorm ideas for visuals and create images consistent with your brand identity. — Dale Bertrand, president, Fire & Spark
19. Analyze, improve, and atomize
Three things stand out to me. The first is content planning: Use AI tools to help identify gaps in current content; analyze existing data to identify opportunities for content marketing; and identify ways to update and enhance existing, top-performing content.
Second is improving customer experience, such as using AI to act in the guise of your customer personas to give feedback on content, landing pages, and messaging that you intend to put out into the market. I also see AI as a tool to deliver more customized feedback/information/knowledge to customers through tailored chatbots.
Third is content atomization. Most of us want to make our best-performing content go further, but it can be tedious work to rip apart a report into pull quotes, infographics, listicles, social media posts, and podcast outlines. Generative AI tools can streamline some of this work; when you feed it your report, you can ask it to pull out key information that would be right for each of these scenarios. — Zontee Hou, managing director, Convince & Convert
Integrate AI strategically, practically, and ethically
I recently heard someone proudly exclaim, “I don’t mess with AI.” Well, that’s a mistake for marketers. Generative AI tools — with the help of knowledgeable human professionals — can be a helpful new member of the marketing team.
Follow some or all these ideas to make your new assistant work harder and better. And don’t get set in how you use AI. Keep asking your peers how they make AI work for them. You never know when you’ll find that next “aha” use.
All tools mentioned in this article were identified by the source. If you have a tool to suggest, tag #CMWorld on social media.
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Advice From Content Marketing World Speakers
