7 real-world examples of brands using Sprout Social AI to drive results

As social media marketing matures, the role of the social team continues to grow alongside it. In a single day, one team might publish content, manage a spike in comments, respond to customer questions and explain performance to leadership.

Each task produces new messages and signals to handle and analyze, which is why AI has become a core part of day-to-day social operations.

Audiences are on board with this shift. According to the Q4 2025 Sprout Social Pulse Survey, 65% of global social users are comfortable with companies using AI to deliver faster customer service on social.

Still, comfort alone isn’t enough. What matters is how effectively AI supports everyday work.

In this article, you’ll get an overview of how brands use Sprout Social AI. You’ll also get to see real-world examples of brands using Sprout Social AI to improve customer care, sharpen listening, optimize content and accelerate impact across social.

How brands use Sprout Social AI

Sprout Social AI assists social teams across the platform, showing up wherever teams need clarity, speed or context. Here are the key ways brands use it today:

• Content creation and optimization: Draft captions faster, adjust messaging before publishing and improve performance with AI-guided suggestions.
• Publishing and scheduling: Identify optimal send times based on your audience’s activity.
• Social listening: Analyze large volumes of conversations to surface themes, sentiment shifts and emerging topics in real time.
• Analytics and reporting: Generate summaries and pull out patterns from performance data.
• Customer care and response management: Triage messages, prioritize urgent or high-risk issues, and automate responses to routine inquiries.
• Competitive and trend analysis: Track competitors and monitor market signals to spot changes early.
• Advocacy: Surface approved content for employees and measure the impact of their sharing.
• Influencer marketing: Discover creators aligned to your brand values, evaluate partnerships and report on campaign performance.

7 examples of brands using Sprout Social AI in action

AI delivers the most value when it helps teams solve clear, immediate problems. That might mean managing an inbox that’s growing faster than responses can keep up, or understanding why engagement suddenly drops without a clear explanation.

The brands below turned to Sprout Social AI to meet issues like these head-on. Each example breaks down the challenge the team faced, how they applied specific Sprout AI capabilities and what changed as a result, from faster response times to stronger engagement.

1. Honda: Intent-based inbox management for better customer care

Honda’s U.S. social team managed comments, messages and community engagement across platforms with a team of just four people. As volume increased, inbox triage quickly absorbed hours each day.

The team needed a way to organize incoming messages, surface high-priority conversations, and reduce the time spent sorting and reassigning cases, especially as social became a key channel for customer support and engagement.

What the team needed

• Less manual effort spent managing inbox volume
• Better prioritization for high-value engagements

How Honda US uses Sprout Social AI

• Sentiment analysis analyzes incoming messages for tone and purpose before routing them by urgency. This move reduced daily inbox management time from about five hours to two, without losing sight of critical customer questions.
• Intent analysis and hybrid automated rules ensure messages reach the right team members quickly. Over time, this helped cut time spent in the Smart Inbox by up to 40 percent, freeing capacity for content planning and proactive analysis.
• Tagging and intelligent filters surface high-value interactions, such as comments, shares and direct messages. This focus contributed to a 91% high-quality engagement action rate, well above the industry benchmark.

As Allie Coulter, Enterprise Social Media Practice Lead at Honda US, shared, “The fact that the Sprout team listened and really understood our process, which then helped influence enhancements to the tool, that’s a game changer.”

Watch the video to hear more.

2. Caesars Entertainment: Streamlining content creation and social listening

Caesars Entertainment manages an extensive portfolio of hospitality and entertainment brands, each with its own audience, channels and campaigns.

Every day, their social team works across multiple accounts, responds to customer questions and monitors a high volume of brand conversations. Accessibility is also part of the mandate, with content needing to work for all audiences.

Caesars also uses social media to support its employer brand, sharing team member stories and open roles via dedicated careers accounts to connect with current and future employees.

To manage all of that, Caesars uses Sprout Social AI for both content creation and social listening.

What the team needed

• Varied, on-brand content without repeating copy, across brand and careers accounts
• Accessibility support, including alt text at scale
• Faster ways to analyze large volumes of social conversation

How Caesars uses Sprout Social AI

• AI Assist generates multiple variations of campaign and employer brand copy, helping the team avoid repetition when publishing across multiple accounts. It also creates alt text for images, reducing manual effort while supporting accessibility. Bianca Shaw, Head of Social Media & Digital Reputation at Caesars Entertainment, shared how her team uses AI Assist in this Instagram post

• Trellis, Sprout’s AI agent, replaces manual listening work by letting the team ask questions in plain language and quickly explore sentiment, contributors and detractors.

As Bianca shared during a recent Breaking Ground event, “Trellis has provided so much ease in being able to extract a lot of the information that would normally take me so much time and bandwidth.”

3. SKP Creative: Optimizing publishing and sentiment analysis

SKP Creative is a full-service agency serving clients across social, digital, traditional marketing, reputation management and crisis communications. Their work involves managing hundreds of client profiles across multiple networks, with a steady stream of DMs, mentions and comments that require timely, accurate responses.

What the team needed

• One place to manage incoming messages across hundreds of profiles
• Clear sentiment signals to guide tone and prioritization
• Data-backed guidance on when to publish content
• Reporting that combines organic, paid and competitive metrics

How SKP Creative uses Sprout Social AI

• Sentiment analysis within Sprout’s Smart Inbox helps the team quickly understand tone and urgency across incoming messages, making it easier to prioritize responses across accounts.
• Optimal Send Times informs publishing decisions, helping teams schedule content based on when audiences are most likely to engage.

“When you’re managing hundreds of client profiles across multiple networks, message volume quickly becomes unmanageable, but Sprout’s Smart Inbox makes handling that chaos feel effortless,” says Tolk Persons, Director of Analytics at SKP Creative.

4. Care to Beauty: Scaling influencer marketing with data-led discovery

Care to Beauty is a global online retailer specializing in dermatologist-backed cosmetics and premium beauty products, serving customers in more than 180 countries.

The brand offers an expert-led shopping experience rooted in education and accessibility. Influencer marketing plays a central role in that approach, centered on long-term partnerships with creators who build trust across global markets.

As the business grew, Care to Beauty’s influencer program grew with it. At first, the team used a mix of influencer tools and spreadsheets to manage applications and campaigns. However, this approach became difficult to sustain as creator interest increased.

What the team needed

• A faster way to evaluate and vet influencer applications
• Better visibility into audience demographics, interests and authenticity
• One place to manage campaigns, partnerships and performance data

How Care to Beauty uses Sprout Social AI

• Influencer Marketing by Sprout Social helps the team filter and identify cosmetic influencers based on audience quality, demographics and alignment with brand values. As a result, they reduced time spent analyzing profiles by 75% and 10X influencer-attributed sales compared to the program’s performance in the previous sales period.

As Anistalda Gomes, Creative Content Lead at Care to Beauty, explains, “What immediately stood out was the robust data and filtering capabilities. It helped us find the right influencers for each market much faster and with more confidence that they would be aligned to our strategy.”

5. Benefit Cosmetics: Using social listening and analytics to stay ahead of the curve

Benefit Cosmetics runs one of the most recognizable social presences in the beauty industry. With multiple campaigns, launches and fan-driven moments happening at once, the team relies on social data to stay close to what audiences care about and track evolving conversations across channels.

Listening and analytics play a central role in that work. Benefit uses social data to understand performance and inform content decisions across campaigns.

What the team needed

• A reliable way to identify which posts and formats drive engagement and acquisition
• Faster visibility into emerging industry themes and trends
• Competitive benchmarks to see how the brand compares within the beauty category

How Benefit uses Sprout Social AI

• Analyze by AI Assist for Listening helps surface significant words, phrases, hashtags, emojis and Smart Categories within listening topics. Instead of scanning dashboards, the team gets clear summaries that highlight what’s gaining traction and why it matters.
• Social media analytics in Sprout show how content performs across channels, helping guide the team’s content
• Competitive reporting brings industry benchmarks and competitor data into the same view, making trend analysis easier to act on.

“Having these tools from Sprout has helped us better understand what our audience is looking for and enjoys seeing,” says Irene Xu, Assistant Manager of Social Media, Benefit Cosmetics.

6. Paychex: Strengthening social responses with Enhance by AI Assist

Paychex is a leading provider of Human Capital Management solutions. They support roughly 800,000 businesses with payroll, HR, retirement and benefits solutions.

Before adopting Sprout Social, the Organic Social team primarily operated in a reactive, publishing-only model. Social posts were more of a final step than a strategic input. At the same time, the Care team managed social responses in a separate platform, using legacy systems and spreadsheets for reporting. This setup required many additional steps and handoffs, diverting time from thoughtful customer engagement.

What the team needed

• Help crafting social-friendly responses that match the brand voice and tone
• A way to move beyond scripted templates without slowing response times
• Better alignment between publishing, care and reporting processes

How Paychex uses Sprout Social AI

• Care representatives use Enhance by AI Assist suggestions to develop more conversational, brand-aligned post captions and replies while maintaining a human touch.

As Michelle Latoy, 24/7 Enterprise Manager at Paychex, shared, “We’re not trained on social media. Our agents are thinking about it with a service mindset. Using Sprout’s AI functionality to help rewrite responses makes them more personable.”

7. Purple Square CX: Using AI-powered tagging and analytics to improve content strategy

Purple Square CX is a customer experience advisory that helps organizations improve how they engage, retain and build loyalty with their customers. Their work spans CX strategy, marketing automation and customer data platforms, often supporting teams that manage complex datasets across multiple tools and channels.

Because Purple Square works closely with clients on measurement and optimization, social analytics help them understand what content performs, why it resonates and how teams should adjust their approach over time. Manual tagging and fragmented reporting made it harder to consistently track themes and evaluate performance at the level their work demanded.

What the team needed

• A reliable way to tag social content consistently
• Precise performance data tied to specific themes and campaigns
• Less manual effort spent organizing and analyzing posts

How Purple Square uses Sprout Social AI

• AI automation and tagging suggestions help the team apply relevant tags quickly and consistently across content. Custom tags enable deeper reporting, making it easier to connect content decisions to outcomes.
• Advanced analytics enable them to analyze tagged content and understand how different themes perform over time.

As Saud Shahid of Purple Square CX shared, “What I like best is the custom tagging system paired with advanced analytics. The AI-powered tagging suggestions are a time-saver, ensuring consistency and efficiency across all content.”

What these brands have in common

These brands span a range of industries, from utilities and automotive to beauty and professional services. Yet the way they use AI on social looks surprisingly similar. Here’s a breakdown.

1. First, AI functions inside existing workflows. AI Assist helps teams draft and refine copy in the same tools they use to publish. Automated Rules and bots sort and collect information before a human steps in. Tagging suggestions and sentiment analysis run alongside analytics teams’ existing tools.
2. Teams act on what AI surfaces. Insights don’t sit in dashboards. They use social intelligence to inform routing decisions, publishing schedules, creator selection and response priorities.
3. Finally, human judgment stays at the center. People still set tone, decide what matters and handle complex conversations. AI handles repetitive steps, pattern detection and initial passes, giving teams more time to focus on context and decision-making.

Overall, these teams treat AI like any other tool. They use it for everyday tasks, keep what helps and drop what doesn’t.

Gain stronger, smarter results with Sprout Social AI

The examples in this article show how teams across industries are already putting AI to work in practical ways. If you’re thinking about what that could look like for your social team, the next step is to see it up close and decide where it fits. Sprout Social AI gives teams a place to start, test and build confidence over time.

Request a demo to explore how it could support your team’s day-to-day work.