Marketers: AI isn’t going to replace you. But if you want to be the most knowledgeable and best-equipped marketer in your field, you need to stay ahead of the curve by mastering how to use AI in your role. An AI-based culture we build at Sprout Social.
Let’s be clear: AI and automation are and will be a revolution in the art and science of marketing. But at this early stage of the AI revolution, we envision AI as a powerful enabler that builds on existing strengths, as well as an assistant that shields individuals from tedious tasks, freeing them up to spend time and energy on improving their creative and strategic work. We want our team to have the AI skills and confidence to power our capabilities, strategy, and planning, so we can operate as a world-class team and create a magnetic culture.
To achieve this, we must be agile and move quickly so that we can adapt to the rapid pace of AI innovation. Yet if we move forward too fastwe risk creating silos, running into legal and ethical challenges, complicating our tech stack, and failing to achieve our business goals. That’s why we created our Marketing AI Steering Group, a cross-functional team dedicated to the strategic, responsible, and ethical adoption of AI technology. We’re accelerating AI adoption across our team, but we’re doing it thoughtfully—dare I say consciously.
Let’s dive into how AI mastery, mass adoption, and intentionality help our team anticipate customer needs and empower them to become better marketers.
Why Marketers Need to Use AI
Marketing teams that aren’t taking AI seriously are already way behind. Investments in AI are essential to making the funnel more efficient and marketers more productive, and this is just the beginning. It’s estimated that integrating AI could increase companies’ profits by up to $4.4 trillion per yearThe more marketers leverage it, the more positively it reflects on individual and company performance.
Social Media Productivity Report 63% of social media marketers agree that manual tasks prevent them from doing high-impact work, reinforcing the fact that many marketers are bogged down in tasks that could easily be handled by AI. 75% of marketers agree that AI is an important factor in how they can do their jobs, and 93% believe AI has a positive impact on their performance.
This is how we see AI at Sprout: a force multiplier that dramatically increases the time our team members have for their most critical work.
For example, we use tools like Writer to speed up case study creation: what used to be a weeks-long process has become a one-day task. We also use Sprout AI Assistance Capabilities to write social media posts and generate alt text faster, and use our AI Social listening at the source performance information And business intelligence in a few seconds.
Why We Need an AI Steering Committee
Given the promise of AI, it can be tempting to move too quickly in integrating new tools and rebuilding workflows. State of Social Media Report 202398% of business leaders believe that companies need to better understand the potential of AI technology to be successful in the long term. Introducing new tools on a case-by-case basis without checking compatibility with your existing tech stack actually creates more inefficiency.
Picture this familiar scenario: Your team is eager to start using AI. The most commercially known solutions are content creation tools, so that’s where they start. Without a clear, centralized plan, content creation becomes your only use case for AI. If AI can infiltrate other departments, it becomes fragmented and siloed, barely scratching the surface of what’s possible and causing conflict between departments.
Using AI for content creation is great, but rather than thinking of AI solely as a solution to tactical work, you should be using it to solve large-scale challenges, like how to best position your product. You can use AI insights to better understand how your audience uses your product or service, and then use them to inform your messaging and positioning. These insights will then trickle down to many other areas of marketing, including your content strategy, demand generation tactics, and more.
That’s where Sprout’s AI Marketing Steering Group comes in. This committee drives consistent use of AI to tackle the heart of our most pressing problems. marketing opportunitieslike with our product, our messaging, and creating the customer journey. The group provides guidance on how and where AI should be used in our department, while ensuring that our company doesn’t buy too much technology or overcomplicate our martech stack.
Working with legal and IT teams, the committee prioritizes use cases to explore and facilitates learning and iteration at scale. This allows us to bring AI not just to individual teams, but to the entire marketing department and, in some cases, the entire company.
Answering ethical questions
The steering group addresses governance, compliance and ethical concernsThey set the standard for meeting legal requirements and maintaining transparency about AI-generated content (even when it is not legally required).
For example, we know that it would not be ethics to try to pass off an AI-generated blog post as being written by a human. This would be misleading to our audience and a violation of our internal privacy policy. AI Policyeven if it was not expressly illegal.
No matter what stage of adoption a particular AI tool is in, compliance is always a priority. From defining data security considerations and requirements during the exploratory phase to fully integrating compliance into our operations, responsible use should be a guiding principle.
How the Steering Committee Drives AI Adoption
Choosing the right technology is critical, but an AI strategy that ignores people, culture, and processes is doomed to failure. People are the most critical factor in the AI equation. At Sprout, we’ve developed ongoing training and built-in rituals that create new team dynamics and encourage employee experimentation, but with the right guardrails in place.
Our process for deploying new tools
First, we beta test all of our AI releases. We have a pre-selected list of early adopters of marketing AI (some of whom are on the committee) who stress test all of our new tools to see how they might coexist with current tools and processes. From there, we train the entire marketing team on the new tool, sharing effective tips, workflows, best practices, and early successes.
We regularly encourage collaboration and exploration by sparking discussions in our Slack channels (we have one dedicated to AI tools). Our committee members also consult on cross-functional projects that would benefit from using the new AI tool.
To build momentum around AI innovation, we share successes with specific tools during our marketing meetings and other working lunches. We also use this time to offer higher-level training (sometimes with external experts) to accelerate skills development and gather feedback that shapes our culture.
Creating an AI culture across the enterprise
Fostering an AI culture within marketing (and beyond) isn’t just about adopting the latest tools, it’s about integrating AI into the way we work every day. With AI, marketers can redefine their industries, create new markets, and drive economic growth. At Sprout, we’re committed to ensuring our team not only understands the potential of AI, but is equipped to use it responsibly and ethically.
Marketing leaders and steering committees play a critical role in this transformation by championing AI initiatives and driving cross-functional collaboration. These groups ensure that the benefits of AI extend beyond marketing and permeate throughout the organization. In doing so, we empower our teams to innovate, drive results, and stay ahead of the curve in an ever-changing landscape.
Looking for more resources to help drive AI adoption in marketing and across your business? Check out our AI resource toolkit for social media teams.
