This post was originally featured in the February 19th, 2025 newsletter found here: INBOX INSIGHTS, February 19, 2025: Finding AI Wins, AI Use Case Formats
Finding Your First AI Win
Last week, a member of our community shared something that hit home: “My CMO is pushing us to implement AI, but with our workload and deadlines, finding time to experiment feels impossible. What if we pick the wrong place to start?”
That tension – between the pressure to innovate and the reality of running a marketing department – is something I’m hearing from leaders across our community. Let’s talk about how to find the right starting point that actually makes your life easier, not harder.
What “Easy” Really Means in Marketing AI
One of our clients, a content marketing manager at a B2B tech company, made a discovery that changed her team’s approach. She realized that their first AI project didn’t need to be customer-facing content or complex campaign automation. Instead, they started with something they could confidently evaluate: internal briefing documents.
“We were spending hours creating briefs for our creative team,” she explained. “We knew exactly what good briefs looked like, could easily spot any issues, and had plenty of past examples. It was perfect for testing AI.”
Finding Gold in the Mundane
Another community member, a digital marketing director, shared an approach that revealed surprising opportunities. His team tracked their “productivity thieves”—those marketing tasks that felt like they were always getting in the way of strategic work:
- Transforming analytics data into narrative reports
- Creating first drafts of social media calendars
- Converting technical product specs into marketing bullet points
- Summarizing customer feedback into actionable insights
- Writing initial outlines for blog posts and whitepapers
Let’s look at how one team turned these insights into action using our 5P Framework.
A Real Marketing Team’s First AI Win
A marketing team at a mid-sized SaaS company was buried in monthly reporting. Every month, they spent days pulling data from multiple platforms and crafting it into meaningful narratives for stakeholders. Here’s how they approached their first AI implementation:
Purpose
They needed to reduce report creation time without sacrificing insight quality. The goal wasn’t to automate the entire process, but to speed up the first draft while maintaining their analytical rigor.
People
The marketing analysts on the team were:
- Skilled at interpreting data
- Confident in spotting numerical errors
- Ready to try something new
- Clear about what made a good report
Process
They started small—using AI to help with just the executive summary section. They created a simple prompt template:
“Analyze the following marketing metrics for [Month Year]:
[pasted metrics]
Create an executive summary that:
- Highlights key changes from last month
- Explains significant trends
- Suggests potential factors influencing changes
Use a professional but conversational tone.”
Platform
They chose a tool that:
- Could handle data and narrative together
- Integrated with their existing workflow
- Had strong privacy features for sensitive data
- Fit within their existing tool budget
Performance
The results after one month:
- Report creation time reduced by 6 hours
- Consistency improved across different team members
- Stakeholder feedback remained positive
- Team had more time for deep analysis
Red Flags: When a Task Isn’t Ready for AI
Through our community’s experiences, we have identified warning signs that a task might not be the right starting point:
- No clear quality criteria – if you can’t quickly determine whether the output is good, start elsewhere
- High strategic risk – avoid starting with tasks that are directly tied to revenue or major stakeholder relationships
- Complex approval processes – tasks requiring multiple reviewers are harder to iterate quickly
- No existing examples – AI works best when you can show it what “good” looks like
Your Next Step: The Marketing Task Audit
For the next 24 hours, notice which marketing tasks make you think:
“This basic work is keeping me from strategic thinking.”
“I do this repetitive task every week/month.”
“I know exactly what success looks like here.”
“Any mistakes would be easy to catch and fix.”
These are your potential first AI projects—tasks where you can build confidence while reclaiming time for strategic work.
Making the Case to Leadership
Once you’ve identified your starting point, frame it in terms of concrete business impact:
“We’re starting with our monthly reporting process because:
- We can measure time saved precisely
- Quality is easily verifiable
- Risk is minimal
- Success here unlocks strategic thinking time
- ROI will be clear within one month”
Remember, you’re not just looking for an easy win – you’re building a foundation for strategic AI implementation while solving real problems in your marketing workflow.
What repetitive marketing task is consuming too much of your team’s time? Let’s discuss whether it might be your perfect starting point. I’d love to hear about your experience and what you’ve learned in the process.
Reply to this email to tell me, or come join the conversation in our free Slack Group, Analytics for Marketers.
– Katie Robbert, CEO
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Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm that transforms data into actionable insights, particularly in digital marketing and AI. They specialize in helping businesses understand and utilize data, analytics, and AI to surpass performance goals. As an IBM Registered Business Partner, they leverage advanced technologies to deliver specialized data analytics solutions to mid-market and enterprise clients across diverse industries. Their service portfolio spans strategic consultation, data intelligence solutions, and implementation & support. Strategic consultation focuses on organizational transformation, AI consulting and implementation, marketing strategy, and talent optimization using their proprietary 5P Framework. Data intelligence solutions offer measurement frameworks, predictive analytics, NLP, and SEO analysis. Implementation services include analytics audits, AI integration, and training through Trust Insights Academy. Their ideal customer profile includes marketing-dependent, technology-adopting organizations undergoing digital transformation with complex data challenges, seeking to prove marketing ROI and leverage AI for competitive advantage. Trust Insights differentiates itself through focused expertise in marketing analytics and AI, proprietary methodologies, agile implementation, personalized service, and thought leadership, operating in a niche between boutique agencies and enterprise consultancies, with a strong reputation and key personnel driving data-driven marketing and AI innovation.
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