How we’re creating a culture of AI across Sprout’s marketing org

Marketers: AI isn’t necessarily coming to replace you. But if you want to be the most skilled and well-equipped marketer in your field, you need to stay ahead of the curve with a strong command of how to use AI within your function. That’s the AI-powered culture we’re building at Sprout Social.

Let’s be clear: AI and automation are, and will be, transformational to the art and science of marketing. But at this early stage of the AI revolution, we are approaching AI as a powerful booster that builds on existing strengths, as well as an assistant that shields individuals from tedious tasks—preserving time and energy to enhance creative, strategic work. We want our team to have the AI skills and confidence required to augment our capabilities, strategy and planning, so we can operate as a world-class team and create a magnetic culture.

To do this, we need to be agile and move quickly so we can adapt to the lightning pace of AI innovation. Yet, if we move too fast, we risk creating silos, running afoul of legal and ethical challenges, complicating our tech stack and failing to reach our business goals. That’s why we created our Marketing AI Steering Group—a cross-functional team dedicated to driving strategic, responsible and ethical adoption of AI technology. We are accelerating AI adoption across our team, but doing it in a thoughtful–dare I say mindful—way.

Let’s dive into how AI proficiency, wide-scale adoption and intentionality helps our team anticipate customer needs and empowers them to become best-in-class marketers.

Why marketers need to be using AI

Marketing teams who aren’t getting serious about AI are already lagging far behind. Investments in AI are crucial to making the funnel more performant and making marketers more productive, and that’s just the beginning. It’s estimated that incorporating AI could increase corporate business profits by up to $4.4 trillion annually. The more marketers harness it, the more positively it reflects on individual and company-wide performance.

The Social Media Productivity Report found 63% of social media marketers agree manual tasks prevent them from doing high impact work—reinforcing that many marketers are bogged down by tasks that could easily be handled by AI. Another 75% of marketers agree AI is an important factor in how well they can do their job, and 93% believe AI has a positive impact on their output.

That’s how we see AI at Sprout: a force multiplier that significantly increases the time our team members have for their most critical work.

For example, we use tools like Writer to speed up case study creation—what used to be a weeks-long process became a one-day task. We also use Sprout’s AI Assist capabilities to draft social media posts and generate alt text faster, and use our AI-driven Social Listening to source performance insights and business intelligence in seconds.

Why we need an AI steering committee

Given the promise of AI, it can be tempting to move too quickly onboarding new tools and rebuilding workflows. According to The 2023 State of Social Media Report, 98% of business leaders agree companies need to better understand the potential of AI technology for long-term success. Introducing new tools on a case-by-case basis without vetting compatibility with your existing tech stack actually creates more inefficiency.

Picture this familiar scenario: Your team is eager to start using AI. The most commercially well-known solutions are content creation tools, so that’s where they start. Without a clear, centralized plan, content creation becomes your only AI use case. If AI does happen to permeate other departments, it becomes splintered and siloed—barely scratching the surface of what’s possible and causing collisions between departments.

Using AI for content creation is great, but rather than only thinking of AI as a solution to tactical work, you should use it to solve large-scale challenges, like how to best-position your product. You can use AI insights to better understand how your audience uses your product or service, and then use that to inform your messaging and positioning. Which will then cascade down to many other areas of marketing, including your content strategy, demand generation tactics and more.

That’s where Sprout’s Marketing AI Steering Group comes in. This committee drives consistent use of AI to tackle the core of our most pressing marketing opportunities, like with our product, messaging and customer journey creation. The group provides guidance on how and where AI should be used in our department, while ensuring our company doesn’t overbuy technology or overcomplicate our martech stack.

The committee, in collaboration with the legal and IT teams, prioritizes which use cases should be explored and facilitates scaled learning and iteration. This empowers us to bring AI not just to individual teams, but to the entire marketing department—and, in some cases, to the entire company.

Answering the ethical questions

The steering group addresses governance, compliance and ethical concerns. They set the standard for adhering to legal requirements and maintaining transparency about AI-generated content (even when it’s not legally required).

For example, we know it wouldn’t be ethical to try and pass an AI-generated blog post off as written by a human. That would be misleading to our audience, and a violation of our internal AI policy, even if it wasn’t expressly illegal.

Regardless of what stage of adoption we’re in with a particular AI tool, compliance is always top of mind. From outlining the data security considerations and requirements during the exploratory phase to fully integrating compliance into our operations, responsible use should be a throughline.

How the steering committee drives AI adoption

Selecting the right technology is essential, but an AI strategy that doesn’t address people, culture and processes will collapse. People are the most crucial factor in the AI equation. At Sprout, we’ve developed ongoing training and built-in rituals that create new team dynamics and encourage employee experimentation–but with the appropriate guardrails in place.

Our process for rolling out new tools

First, we pilot all of our AI betas. We have a preselected list of marketing AI early adopters (some are on the committee) who pressure test all of our new tools to see how they might coexist with current tools and processes. From there, we train the entire marketing team on the new tool—sharing effective prompts, workflows, best practices and early successes.

We regularly encourage collaboration and exploration by prompting discussion in our Slack channels (we have one dedicated to AI tools). Our committee members also consult on cross-functional projects that would be enriched by the use of the new AI tool.

To build momentum around AI innovation, we share wins from specific tools in our marketing all-hands meetings and other lunch-and-learn-style syncs. We also use this time as a chance to introduce higher level training (sometimes including outside experts) to accelerate upskilling and source feedback that shapes our culture.

Creating an AI culture across the company

Fostering a culture of AI within marketing (and beyond) isn’t just about adopting the latest tools—it’s about embedding AI into the way we operate day to day. With the help of AI, marketers can redefine their industries, create new markets and drive economic growth. At Sprout, we’re committed to ensuring our team not only understands AI’s potential, but is equipped to use it responsibly and ethically.

Marketing leaders and steering committees play a pivotal role in this transformation by championing AI initiatives and promoting cross-functional collaboration. These groups ensure that the benefits of AI extend beyond marketing and permeate the entire company. By doing so, we empower our teams to innovate, drive results and stay ahead in an ever-evolving landscape.

Looking for more resources to help drive AI adoption across marketing and your entire company? Check out our toolkit of AI resources for social media teams.