If you or your leadership team think you’re behind on adopting AI tools, take heart: You’re not.
Despite what you may be hearing from different industry reports, it’s still very early in the game. However, things are moving fast. AI tools are evolving rapidly, and it’s important to engage in the conversation, stay informed, and be intentional about how you approach and implement these tools.
AI Education is Critical for Leadership and Teams, Not Just Select Roles
AI tools can do incredible things, but leadership and teams need to understand the capabilities and limitations so they can continue to experiment and clear up misconceptions that pop up.
Leaders need to learn how AI impacts their strategic plans and determine how their teams need to adapt and evolve to utilize them effectively. This isn’t just about finding and buying a subscription to the right tools. It’s bigger than just the tool.
Bringing AI into your organization is a paradigm shift that requires leadership involvement to make sure AI is being used responsibly and effectively.
Your teams need to build AI literacy, which starts with education, clear guidelines for responsible use, and creating pilot programs, councils, and experimentation teams to test tools in real-world scenarios.
It’s not enough to throw a tool at a problem; you have to build competency from the ground up.
AI Is a Tool, Not a Strategy
One of the biggest misconceptions is that adopting AI tools means you have an AI strategy. But that’s not the case.
Today, AI tools help solve problems faster and more efficiently—but they’re only as good as the higher level strategy behind it.
An easier way to think about incorporating AI tools is to identify the key business problems you need to solve and build business cases, including the extended value (time or money) to the organization.
Once you’ve identified and prioritized your top business cases, you can look for AI solutions and tools that can help accelerate the completion of whatever project or initiative floated to the top of the list.
AI should support your business goals, not the other way around.
AI is a Human Challenge, Not Just a Tech Challenge
Another misconception is that AI is purely a technology problem. In reality, it’s much more of a change management challenge.
How your teams use, understand, and implement these tools, and how your leadership team will support and defend the process for their implementation and adoption, is where the real challenge lies.
Leadership needs to drive this change by supporting their teams, solving the right problems, and selling the vision of AI adoption across the entire organization. It’s not a “push button, get easy fix” solution.
AI tools can accelerate work, but identifying how and when and why to use them, as well as assessing the impact to people, processes, and results isn’t something that happens overnight.
Studies show that 77% of employees say AI has added to their workload, largely because organizations haven’t properly prepared them with the education and training they need to integrate these tools effectively.
“96% of C-suite leaders expect AI to boost worker productivity, but 77% of employees report AI has increased their workload.”- Source: Upwork
AI is Reshaping Marketing Channels, Not Just An Add-On
AI is also changing how audiences search for information and consume content. From zero-click searches that start with AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, and visual content searching on TikTok and YouTube, marketers can no longer rely solely on organic and paid search alone to drive traffic.
This fragmentation means you’ll need to invest in stronger branding, positioning, and reputation management.
Earned media placements and PR are going to become even more critical as audiences move away from traditional search.
At the same time, measuring the impact of AI on your traffic drivers will get a bit trickier. It’ll take a combination of different data sources and some curiosity to figure out the true effect these shifts are having on your marketing efforts. Google, famous for not sharing ALL of it’s organic search data, probably isn’t eager to add a bunch of new referral sources to GA4 and transparently expose any traffic share erosion.
We speak more in-depth about the topic of the AI in social and search on a recent episode of our Social Pros podcast.
AI is an Accelerator, Not a Replacement for Humans
AI tools allow your team to do more, faster—especially for repetitive, generative, and data-driven tasks. But that doesn’t mean you should automate everything and expect better results.
AI can help you scale content production, but without human oversight, you risk creating mediocre, cookie-cutter content that adds to the noise instead of standing out.
We’re on the precipice of being overwhelmed by boring content that fills spaces instead of sparking conversations, especially if we allow AI tools to do most of the thinking and heavy lifting in the content creation space.
The real value of AI today is in its ability to speed up tasks while still allowing humans to guide strategy, refine content, and ensure high-quality outcomes.
Humans need to stay in the loop to boost the quality of outputs, refine strategy, validate claims, and make sure the messaging is targeted for your specific audiences and their needs.
As of today, AI can’t quite capture the nuance of human emotions. Whether it’s sarcasm or complex emotional journeys, AI tools often miss the mark when it comes to interpreting the subtleties of human behavior and lack the flavor that human experiences bring to content and other marketing activities.
Your unique experiences, intuition, and creativity are your true competitive advantages that will help set your marketing and messages apart from lazier content your competitors may be using AI tools to exclusively generate.
AI tools are powerful assets that can accelerate your marketing efforts, but they’re not silver bullets.
The organizations that will ultimately succeed in this AI-driven era are the ones that know when to use AI and how to invest and support their teams with the time and tools they need to accelerate their work—and when to rely on their human teams to bring creativity, empathy, and intuition to the table.
Our team at Convince & Convert is highly experienced in this area, and can help you craft an AI strategy to accelerate your marketing efforts. Learn more about partnering together so you can stay on the fore-front of this rapidly evolving technology.
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