5 Takeaways On AI And Marketing Content

Matthew Lieberman is the CMO at PwC U.S. and an innovative executive at the crossroads of marketing, media and technology.

As marketers, we know what buyers want: incredibly appealing content customized just for them and updated nonstop.

Sounds simple, right? In reality, delivering on that promise—at scale and without skyrocketing costs—has always been a challenge. But with AI, it’s becoming not just possible but practical. That said, building an AI-powered “content supply chain” takes more than just adopting AI tools. It requires a clear vision, strategic restructuring, new skill sets and thoughtful change management.

At my firm, we’re all in on AI within our walls and for our clients. With the marketing world engaging in key events such as the Adobe Summit in March, I’ve put together some takeaways about our experiences with AI and marketing content. Here are my top five:

1. The old ways no longer work.

Marketing leaders know they should change how they deliver growth and help the business—and AI is a big part of the answer. In PwC’s October 2024 Pulse Survey, 93% of the CMOs responding shared that positioning marketing as a growth driver at their company is a challenge. Additionally, 78% agreed that their current business model needs to change fundamentally, and the same proportion said they’ll use GenAI to make changes to their business model. It’s part of the accelerating trend to find more and more concrete value from AI right now.

For marketers, the key message is to deliver growth, keep costs down and show that you’re getting value from AI.

2. Make it hyper-personalized—and reusable.

AI’s value in content creation (and marketing in general) comes from smart human-AI collaboration. Here’s how that can look. Here’s what that looks like in practice: your skilled creatives generate ideas and conduct research, using AI as a thought partner to surface insights and explore angles. They might even leverage AI to draft an initial version, which the team then refines into original, high-value thought leadership or other compelling content.

Once the content is finalized, AI takes on a supporting role in repurposing it. It breaks down the text into modular components—headlines, summaries, key quotes, statistics and action points—allowing marketers to tailor messaging dynamically. A CFO at a tech company might see a different headline, data point and key takeaway than a healthcare CIO. A social media post for recruiting talent will feature an entirely different mix. AI not only assembles these variations but also helps optimize them—suggesting multiple versions for A/B testing, analyzing engagement and refining outputs for better results.

People are taking the lead every step of the way, but AI helps you adeptly personalize it and reuse it at scale. It can feel more exciting for your customers since it really was made just for them.

3. Keep your voice, manage your risks and get it all organized.

No matter how much you use AI, you still need to keep what defines you: your brand voice. If you have formal brand guidelines, teach them to AI and keep them front and center for your team. If you don’t have brand guidelines, create them now. Connect, too, with your risk and compliance teams. Work out a review process for AI-enhanced content that always keeps people in charge of making the key decisions.

Now, how do you keep an eye on the massive amount of new, personalized content you’re going to be creating? Standardize it and put it all in the same place: a digital asset manager to help share, edit, track, review and distribute approved content. All these new standards and tools can help ensure consistency and quality while mitigating risk and increasing speed.

4. You may need to market marketing to marketers.

AI may change everyone’s job. That can feel scary. Marketers are some of the most forward-looking professionals around, but it’s human nature to keep doing things the old way as long as you can. And AI is moving fast. If you and your team don’t learn fast, you’ll be left behind.

To manage this change, you need to do more than create new workflows and offer new skills. Identify the new roles that people will fulfill in the age of AI so they don’t fear that AI will displace them. Get people excited and show how AI can enhance their value and workday. You will, in short, need to market the new ways of marketing to your marketers.

However, this transition doesn’t have to be intimidating—it can be engaging, even fun. From AI hackathons to interactive “prompting parties” and creative incentives, there are plenty of ways to make adoption feel like discovery rather than disruption.

5. People matter more than ever.

There’s currently a big “first-mover advantage” to AI, but soon it may just be part of everything every business does. At this point, two things will set you apart: how well you reorganize to leverage AI and how strategic and creative your people are. Anyone can tell a chatbot to “create” content or a marketing strategy, but without humans doing the real thinking and conducting oversight, it won’t be any good.

AI will help power your content supply chain, but people should lead by creating original content and setting a strategy to mix, match and deliver it. Even as AI does much of the work, marketing success will still depend on marketing talent. Make sure your people know that, and then give them the AI-based tools and workflows that can multiply their value.

Final Thoughts

AI-driven marketing isn’t a shortcut—it’s a strategic shift. Integrating AI into a well-structured content supply chain can help brands achieve hyper-personalization at scale while maintaining consistency and quality. However, the true differentiator remains human creativity—the spark that transforms AI-generated insights into engaging, emotionally resonant content that can deliver real business impact.

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