By now, most marketing teams will have an executive-driven edict to “just do it with AI” across campaigns and events. The frustration is real.
How do you do something with AI when that’s largely impossible, and even if it weren’t, where do you start among the ever-growing marketing technology stack and all the noise?
The fact is, most marketing teams in 2025 are heavy users of technology, from email marketing, social media and websites to event planning or simple communication tools like Word.
Rather than saying no or simply doing things how they’ve always been done, there’s a huge opportunity to take a step back and build a strong foundation for an AI future.
There are a few prerequisites to start meaningfully incorporating AI into a marketing team:
- A good understanding of each platform’s ability
- A platform setup and process that’s well matched to the team’s current way of working
- Manual work that’s been identified and automated using the platform’s built-in tools
- At least one person with interest in AI and the willingness to put in the work
I’m talking about a snowball effect that thinks about the big picture while providing immediate talking points for demanding, AI-passionate stakeholders.
Here is an easy, step-by-step approach to start using AI in marketing technology:
- Audit all marketing technology platforms and organize the list by the platforms that affect the most team members. This likely will be a project management system, email marketing/automation system, or website content management system.
- Create a slide deck where each platform has one slide. This slide can include a brief, one-sentence description of the tool and overview of its general AI capabilities.
- Each slide can be broken into three sections detailing:
- Current state (how you’re using the platform)
- Short-term opportunities (AI features that can be reasonably implemented in a quarter)
- Advanced opportunities (AI features that require advanced process, third-party integration or paid upgrades)
- See template example below or view the slide online
- If there are a lot of platforms that work together or overlap, you can organize these into related sections. For example, “Marketing Analytics” could house your Google Analytics, Looker Studio, Google Search Console, etc.
- Lastly, create a simple quarterly tactics slide for each platform to show the steps needed to implement some or all of the identified short-term opportunities in the remainder of the year.
Template example of how to create a simple AI opportunity audit for a marketing technology platform.
View below or online.
2025 is not over. If you continue to spin your wheels trying to jump ahead and plug AI into random sockets, you won’t have anything meaningful to discuss at year-end and will likely have been more unproductive than ever.
There is no fast solution here. There is no AI platform that can do everything for you. There is, however, a simple approach that will give you a needle-moving foundation to prepare for success in the AI future.