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The New AI Role Every Content Team Needs

Marketers are eager to achieve the significant advantages that AI technology can bring to their content operations. Yet a lack of understanding and training may be holding them back.

Relying only on external AI experts for guidance may not hold up for long. Not only is it a missed opportunity for developing valuable institutional knowledge, but outside vendors may provide generalized, cookie-cutter strategies that content teams may struggle to adopt or be unable to apply effectively.

Some enterprising marketing leaders are taking a more proactive and sustainable approach: They’re appointing (or hiring) an “AI liaison” to lead their content team’s AI efforts and initiatives and help guide enterprise-wide decision-making around the technology. 

We consulted experts at the intersection of content marketing and AI to discover what this hybrid role entails, the skill sets required, and the outcomes they’ve experienced. Here’s what they shared.

A role born of necessity

AI is happening whether we like it or not, says Julie Hochheiser Ilkovich, co-founder and managing partner of content agency Masthead. That’s why her organization began experimenting early on to find the best way to get everyone up to speed with the technology and where it made the most sense to use it.

“We started by creating an AI task force of key stakeholders from across our business,” Julie says. However, they quickly realized the need to find the right person to lead the charge and ensure that recommendations could be successfully implemented. 

That someone is Caila Ball-Dionne, Masthead’s VP of strategy and editorial operations, whose unofficial secondary title is now “AI Czar.” “I had been researching and implementing AI into my work. Essentially, I landed the role because I raised my hand. But I also raised some alarm bells,” Caila says.

For example, she pointed out that the search landscape was evolving, and the agency’s SEO and audience growth strategies would need to evolve to stay relevant. Additionally, to counter the possibility that brands may mass adopt AI for content creation, Caila championed diversifying Masthead’s service offerings to help future-proof the business.

Jeremy Goldman, senior director of client briefings at EMARKETER, an industry insights and forecasting business, serves in a similar, though less formalized capacity: He represents the content marketing team within his organization’s AI council. “I led our first pilot, where we tested AI hypotheses,” Jeremy says. He has become his company’s point person for all generative AI coverage. He also shares his acquired AI expertise by speaking at conferences and internal client events.  

Yet, it’s not always feasible to rely on existing team expertise. For example, Tomorrow.io, a weather intelligence platform, had to go outside the organization to hire an AI marketing specialist with the necessary skill sets. “The job description noted the need for someone who could make one plus one equal three in the world of content,” says Ruth Favela, who the company ultimately hired as their AI marketing manager. 

Tomorrow.io’s then-senior content marketing manager was stretched thin and needed help determining the best way to use AI to help supplement and scale their existing content efforts, including their blog and social media posts.  

Given that Ruth’s previous content marketing roles were at various AI start-ups, her combination of tech experience and marketing skills made her well-suited to serve in that capacity. She explains, “I was able to propose an AI tech stack that could be used to research, create content, and then repurpose it. It landed her the job.

What does an AI liaison do?

As with any newly developed role — especially one built around tech innovations — the scope of an AI liaison’s responsibilities can vary by organization. Yet, among the experts we spoke with, some commonalities emerged. 

Leading education

AI liaisons are, first and foremost, educators and influencers, says Cathy McPhillips, chief growth officer at Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute (MAII), an AI education company for marketing and business leaders. 

Cathy notes that the role’s focus on education isn’t just from an onboarding standpoint. “[AI liaisons] should address early-stage questions, such as ‘What is AI?’, ‘Why should we consider this technology?’, and ‘How can I get started?’” she says. “Once tools are onboarded, that person also needs to make sure they’re being used effectively and team members are properly trained on working with them.”

Sharing insights

AI liaisons must also be eager to share their insights with the marketing team and others across the enterprise. “I’m trying to build an engine that will bring in revenue through SEO, video, social, and more, all by speeding it up with AI,” Ruth says. “What I’m constantly reporting back on is not only how our content is performing, but how much time we’ve saved — and how other teams can do the same.” 

Ruth facilitates this by collaborating with “AI captains” in other departments, including engineering, sales, and operations. “We meet to discuss what each team is doing with AI and how they are progressing.” Ruth says they also explore how marketing — the team that has progressed the furthest — can help support other functions’ AI efforts.

Monitoring industry trends

Caila gets some of her AI inspiration by speaking to others with similar organizational roles. “I can share what we’ve tried, what’s working, and why, and they can do the same.” She says the opportunity to learn from each other’s mistakes keeps everyone from getting trapped in the same rabbit holes.

Jessica Hreha, director of AI transformation at Jasper, an AI platform for marketers, says she participates in conferences, Slack communities, and local meetups for AI professionals to keep her skills and know-how updated. “No one’s a definitive expert yet, so it’s incredibly rewarding to gather with people who want to share insights and learn,” she says. “We’re all in this together, and every use case shared may inspire another use case.”  

Other responsibilities assigned to an AI liaison might include:

  • Creating and continually improving a library of prompts that teams can use to create content more efficiently
  • Ensuring AI tech purchases are providing value and serving the proper mission
  • Testing newly available tools and doing a cost-benefit analysis to determine when to invest budget vs. using free versions.

Designate your AI champion

Suppose you feel your team would benefit from developing AI expertise in-house. In that case, Jessica recommends looking for candidates among your existing team members first: “If you have an AI enthusiast on staff — someone self-motivated who is already diving in and safely experimenting with multiple tools while remaining in compliance with your company’s guidelines — they may be in the perfect position to take on the role as your AI lead,” she says.   

This approach has an additional advantage: Internal appointees may have already developed a rapport with their coworkers, institutional knowledge, and familiarity with the content workflow and marketing vision. These can be critical to securing team-wide adoption of the tools and use cases they recommend.

However, according to Jessica, if your content team is very lean or their bandwidth is maxed out, that’s when it may be best to hire externally.

Regardless of how you fill the role, curiosity is key to success, says MAII’s Cathy McPhillips. “No one is an expert in this right now. It’s about finding that person willing to raise their hand and say, ‘I want to see the organization grow and change because of AI,’” she says.

If your aim is to use AI to power content workflows, Jessica says it’s also imperative for your liaison to have a strong foundation in content marketing strategies and best practices. “Experienced content writers can push AI systems further because they know what good looks like. They know what questions to ask and how to add the right context, as well as how to tweak their prompts to refine the responses they receive.”

Ruth refers to her combination of editorial experience and AI know-how as a marketing Swiss army knife. She asserts, “Being able to combine your brand’s editorial guidelines and writing styles with the ability to teach the AI on them and an understanding of how content aligns with the sales funnel bubbles up to using AI in a very strategic manner as a marketer.”

Enable your liaison to succeed

Before appointing an AI liaison, you’ll need the green light from management. As Cathy points out, overcoming C-suite pushback and skepticism can take time and effort. “At many enterprises, the term ‘AI’ has been a non-starter. That’s when it becomes necessary to say, ‘Let me pilot this small program and show you successes.’”

Our experts recommend taking these additional steps to neutralize stakeholder reluctance:

Present a business case in your pitch to get buy-in

Jessica suggests leveraging strategic, high-impact use cases related to your core job or your team’s job when pitching the C-suite. “Be ready to discuss your benchmarks, how much time it will take, who it will involve, and what it will cost,” she says. Then, prepare to bring a success hypothesis based on some experiments you’ve tried. “That’s going to get leadership’s attention.”

Before joining the team at Jasper, Jessica worked at cloud computing technology company VMware. There, she founded the organization’s Marketing AI Council, which was thought to be the first of its kind. She was an early adopter of Jasper’s AI platform and advocated for a trial run to bring more of their content efforts in-house. After pointing out that doing so could reduce agency fees by 50% — saving a half-million dollars per year — VMware agreed to purchase eight licenses for her team. 

As her team started prompting the platform to help generate ad copy like social posts, abstracts, landing pages, and email blurbs, they discovered they could produce initial drafts in a single day, compared to waiting weeks to receive deliverables from an agency partner. “That became our first proof of principle: Reducing the time required to draft content from six weeks to one day,” she says.

From there, her team at VMware partnered with the prompt engineers at Jasper to train the AI on their specific buyer journey stages, content goals at each stage, and the types of assets they needed to produce.

Ultimately, they created a custom app that featured a dropdown menu to select various inputs, such as the journey stage of the asset, type of asset, and target personas. That made it a repeatable workflow everyone on the team could use across all the assets and campaigns they produced. “Once fully developed,” Jessica says, “the content manager could create an asset draft that was around 95% quality-ready to hand over to a human editor.”

Facilitate content team adoption

Another critical facet of the AI liaison role is demonstrating the benefits of new tools and processes to the rest of the marketing team, especially team members who have been used to doing things a certain way for decades. 

“I encourage my colleagues to have an open mind. But I also need to stay open to their feedback,” says Masthead’s Caila Ball-Dionne. “Knowing they can trust I’m not going to disregard their concerns or push something that won’t improve their work helps minimize pushback and non-compliance.”

The key is to show the actual benefits of AI, not just talk about them in vague, prospective terms, says EMARKETER’s Jeremy Goldman. For example, demonstrate how AI can take some of the “necessary evils” — like metadata management and back-end CMS maintenance tasks — off their plates. “No one got into marketing to spend 15% of their time tagging things.” 

Use AI expertise to counteract human obsolescence

Marketers and content creators are understandably nervous about AI someday taking over their jobs. However, MAII’s Cathy McPhillips asserts that avoiding AI is not the best response to those fears.

“If you’ve used AI, you see that it’s imperfect. Humans still need to be involved at every step — particularly when it comes to ensuring the content you publish is accurate and uniquely valuable,” Cathy says. “Not to mention you also can’t write a blog post or generate images using AI and pass it off as your own, according to U.S. copyright law as it stands today.”

Ironically, shrugging off AI for too long is what may eventually lead to the job losses marketers fear. That leads to one last argument in favor of considering an AI liaison for your team: It can help colleagues learn to work alongside artificial intelligence, futureproofing their jobs so they don’t become replaceable.

Dawn Papandrea

Dawn Papandrea

Dawn Papandrea is a freelance writer based in Staten Island, New York, specializing in content for personal finance, consumer, and small business publications and brands. She's a regular contributor to U.S. News & World Report and Investopedia. Her work has also appeared in national publications and websites including Chief Content Officer, Family Circle, Parents, Monster.com, and many others.