Where AI is already delivering Marketing value: Writing + Planning

The assessment shows that the most popular AI use cases are tasks marketers can do on their own and have a similarity to an existing productivity application. The most frequently adopted marketing use cases across the survey are (by % of respondents saying they are doing it “Increasingly” or “All the time”):

  • Revising content to improve writing quality — 87%
  • Web research + summarization — 86%
  • Drafting first versions of marketing content — 78%

These seem to be very popular because they:

  1. Are tasks everyone does (not just specialists),
  2. Don’t require team-wide coordination, and
  3. Mirror tools marketers already use daily (Docs, Word, Search).

But it also shows that to get marketers to go further, they’ll need to think more broadly about what AI is good for

Where there is Untapped Impact – Critical Analysis
Fewer marketers are using AI to improve their strategic work as a critic or thought partner compared to the above use cases:

  • Identifying logical or strategic gaps in written work — 51%
  • Drafting strategies/plans using data & docs — 51%
  • Drafting analyses or data visualizations — 40%

In qualitative discussions with respondents, one CEO put it this way:  “After a period of sharing internal content with my AI tool, I loaded up my board presentation this week and asked what questions I was going to get. The AI killed it—it did better than my board.” . Meanwhile other leaders said they use AI to critique plans and analyses, and that this raised the quality of internal work.

Opportunities to Multiply Marketing Impact
There is also a gap in the use of AI to create derivative content off of what marketers are already doing (and therefore broaden the impact of the work marketers have already done.

  • Applying brand voice or guidelines to content — 46%
  • Creating derivative versions of content for different personas/industries — 36%

Your Next Step
If you or your team are already using AI for writing and research, the leadership opportunity is to experiment with these under-adopted use cases. Even a small pilot can give your team leverage others haven’t captured yet.

Which areas of marketing and AI are be most important to you? Post a comment and let me know—I’ll share deeper examples from the research.

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