Steal These AI Ideas for Your Team

When you ask most marketing teams if they’re using AI, they’ll tell you that it’s become one of their most used tools, but what they’re actually using it for may be what AI is worst at.

I’ve been preparing for a series of talks and workshops where I’ll be helping teams to put AI to work on more helpful and interesting work, the type of stuff that it’s best at. Rather than gatekeep, I’m going to share some of what I’ve learned here.

At least 80% of all work that’s currently being done by AI for the marketing teams that we’ve studied falls into two categories:

1. Copywriting or editing
2. One-off information gathering (ie. Googling)

I think that we can all agree that, at least right now, AI is a pretty mediocre writer. For my baseball fans out there – asking AI to write an Instagram caption for us is like asking Babe Ruth to bunt.

What are we using AI to do?

If I’m going to offer advice on how you could use these tools better, I should probably take my own medicine, right? We test and tinker constantly, but these are just a few ways that AI is helping us to do more with less:

• Business Development – In consulting, finding new projects means slogging through RFPs, postings and keeping tabs on hundreds of different websites where opportunities are posted. We’ve trained a Claude Cowork agent on exactly who we are, what we’re best at, past examples of successful projects and asked it to scour the internet for every project that may be a good fit. That agent runs every Monday morning, creates a list of what it finds, scores them, and places them in a Notion table before pushing a summary to our Slack channel.
• Research & Analysis – We work with many leaders in the tourism industry, and what we’ve heard from them is that it’s impossible to keep up with all the new resorts, data, research, and trends available. We’ve solved that problem by identifying where the best new information is coming from, collecting it, training a Claude Project on what to look for, and then summarizing thousands of pages each month to identify what’s most relevant. The report comes back to us with direct links to each data source, which we then use to create a breakdown our clients can watch or read to keep them at the top of their game.
• Coaching Assistant – In our Accelerator program, we coach local tourism businesses one-on-one and provide them with implementation plans that they can follow to achieve their business goals. In the past year, we’ve delivered over 100 of these projects, and while no business challenge is the same as another, a lot of the how-to information is consistent. We’ve developed a series of custom tools that let our coaches take their notes and ideas from a coaching session, then work with the AI to identify insights and deliver plans that go beyond what any human could have produced in a similar amount of time.

What all of these use cases have in common is that they start with human-generated ideas, they are trained on the specifics of what we need them to do, and then there is a human in the loop at the end who interprets what was produced. The result is that each of us is able to produce work that is many times more valuable than what we would have been capable of on our own.

3 Ways You Can Do More With AI

1. Use Connectors – In 2025, AI was a very smart chatbot. Today, Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT have all broken out of that window and can interact with spreadsheets, docs, software and just about anything else that you can do with your computer. Whichever tool you’re using (start by checking with your IT/Legal policy), find the connections sections and add in the tools that you use most often.
2. Train Your AI – ChatGPT has CustomGPTs, Claude has Projects, Gemini has Gems. Think of this like training your new employee. You just hired a genius who has access to all of the information available on the internet, but it doesn’t know anything about you or the job that you want it to do. The best part: You only have to train it once. It will never forget what you’ve taught it, and will be substantially more capable of doing the work that you need it to do.
3. Give it Harder Problems – The next time you’re stuck on something, or are starting a new project, ask your newly trained AI how it can help you. Every time I feel like what I’m up against is so special and unique that AI can’t possibly help me out, I’m shocked at what it comes up with.

6 Ideas To Get You Started

Want to try this advice out for yourself? Here are some quick-win ways that you can get your AI tools doing real work for you right now:

1. Give it your media plan and historical CPM/CPC benchmarks, then ask it to pressure-test your next budget allocation. It will find the holes in your logic faster than your spreadsheet will.
2. Upload your last quarter’s customer surveys or NPS responses (anonymized) and ask it to identify the patterns, tensions, and unspoken needs that your quantitative scores are hiding.
3. Connect it to your project management tool and ask it to flag every project that’s running behind, surface the bottleneck, and suggest what needs to be reprioritized this week.
4. Connect to your Google Analytics or reporting dashboard and ask it to write your monthly performance summary with specific areas of interest that matter to you
5. Connect it to your email platform or CRM and ask it to identify which audience segments haven’t been contacted recently, or flag campaigns that underperformed.
6. Connect it to your Zoom/Teams/Meet meeting notes and train it on your project list, then ask it each Monday morning: “Based on what we discussed last week, what follow-ups are outstanding and what should I be proactive about this week?”