By Nate Roy,
A few weeks ago, I found myself staring numbly down a long list of looming deadlines. Among them: building a deck for a fast-approaching presentation. I needed to distil complex messaging and input from multiple “cooks” into something concise, visual and engaging enough to hold an audience for 20 minutes. It felt like a full day of work—time I just didn’t have.
So, I decided to turn to the generative AI (GenAI) tool our company uses.
“Here’s what I want to cover,” I typed, feeding it my outline and talking points. Within seconds, it gave me a surprisingly solid draft. Not perfect, but enough to overcome blank-page paralysis and provide a strong starting point, saving hours.
In the end, the presentation got rave feedback, I met my other deadlines and discovered a smarter way I could “partner” with GenAI—not to automate creativity, but to ignite it.
A New Role For GenAI
Here’s the thing: GenAI isn’t just a shiny new toy for marketers anymore. I believe it should be viewed as a productivity engine, increasingly helping to secure a competitive advantage.
In my role at Constructor, AI is core to how we deliver value to the retailers we serve and help optimize shopping experiences. It’s also a big part of how I work personally. Here are four examples of how I use AI as a marketer to work faster, smarter and more strategically.
1. AI As A ‘Thought Partner’
Sometimes, the hardest part of any marketing task is just getting started. Whether it’s structuring a deck, outlining an article or creating a scoring rubric, AI can kick-start the process.
Marketers can use it to:
• Clarify and organize thinking. Try prompting it with a partial idea and asking: “What are three themes related to this topic?” or “What’s a logical flow?”
• Pressure-test assumptions. I often use prompts like: “What are the strongest counterarguments to this position?” or “What might my audience still be wondering?”
• Turn insights into action. Marketers often sit on a wealth of data but struggle to translate it into meaningful next steps. Use GenAI to summarize key trends from campaign or journey analytics, then prompt it with follow-ups like “Which channels are driving the most assisted conversions?” or “Where are drop-offs happening?” Rather than replacing analysis, AI accelerates it.
2. AI For Operational Efficiency
Task efficiency is another part of the GenAI equation. Editing, summarizing, translating, turning longer-form assets into social clips and more—AI helps cut down the grunt work so marketers can focus on high-impact deliverables.
For example, when we host a webinar, we often create a recap blog post, chop up the video into snackable segments for social and generate email copy to drive on-demand views. While we don’t use AI for all of these, it speeds up our workflow significantly. What once took a week across multiple contributors can now be done in an afternoon using AI, strong prompts and, of course, oversight from my team.
We’ve also used AI to support hiring workflows—refining job postings and optimizing them for discoverability. As a result, we’re moving much faster than before.
3. AI-Powered Personalization
Customers and prospects expect more than a one-size-fits-all experience online. They want tailored content and product recommendations, but delivering that manually can be time-consuming and hard to scale.
With AI, marketers can:
• Dynamically serve custom content and search results—based on, for instance, visitors’ industry, preferences and history.
• Power real-time chatbot interactions with smart, context-aware responses.
• Customize and trigger emails based on persona, behaviour and other attributes, and even optimize send-time for better engagement.
The result? More relevant touchpoints and less wasted effort.
4. AI-Fuelled Learning And Insights
AI isn’t just about doing more—it’s also about learning more. One valuable use case we’ve seen is through voice-of-the-customer analysis. Natural language processing tools can sift through thousands of anonymized survey responses, interview transcripts and more—revealing themes and sentiments we might otherwise miss. This helps shape our product positioning, messaging and content strategy.
Another key use case is competitive intelligence. AI tools can monitor price changes, ad campaigns, new product launches and more. This constant pulse on the market helps us stay proactive.
Potential AI Pitfalls And Lessons Learned
Of course, using AI effectively isn’t without challenges. Below are a few lessons learned:
1. Don’t Expect Full Automation
AI is powerful, but it’s not magic. We’ve tested tools that overpromised and underdelivered—like long-form content generators that produced decent and passable but uninspired copy. I think the best results happen when you bring the ideas, and AI helps you sharpen and scale them.
2. Always Prioritize Data Security
Use enterprise-grade tools when handling sensitive information and always anonymize any kind of customer, partner or other confidential external or internal data. In general, be mindful about what information you offer and how you do it, especially where security and compliance are concerns.
3. Vet Tools
Not all platforms are created equal. You’ll likely see different results related to accuracy, tone and style. And when you do test out new AI tools, be sure to do so inside your actual workflows, not just based on vendor promises.
4. Create An AI Policy
As AI usage expands, it helps to have clear guardrails within your organization and specific department—what’s encouraged/allowed, what’s not and where human oversight is required. Many organizations are already starting to make this part of their security operations centre (SOC)/compliance protocols.
The Bottom Line
If I could give marketers one piece of advice when it comes to AI, it would be that this is a shift worth engaging with—early and thoughtfully. AI literacy is quickly becoming table stakes, and companies are increasingly expecting marketing hires to show up with AI skills.
AI is no longer “futuristic”—it’s about being efficient and helping your company perform at the top of its game in a resource-constrained world. The longer you wait to get started, the steeper the learning curve will get. I believe that in the not-so-distant future, using AI won’t set you apart—it’ll simply be part of how modern marketing gets done.
Feature Image Credit: Getty
By Nate Roy
Nate Roy is director of brand and content at Constructor, a leading ecommerce search and product discovery platform. Read Nate Roy’s full executive profile here. Find Nate Roy on LinkedIn. Visit Nate’s website.
