Your content strategist just asked if he should be “upskilling in AI” because he saw another layoff announcement on the group chat. Your analyst is spending lunch breaks taking ChatGPT courses instead of eating. And you’re in back-to-back demos with vendors promising to “10X your team’s output” while your VP keeps asking when you’re going to “rightsize for efficiency”.
The actual threat isn’t AI replacing your team. Its competitors using AI to free up their best talent for high-leverage work, while your strategists are still stuck formatting decks.
If your most strategic people are spending 40% of their day on low-level tasks, compiling reports, formatting presentations, drafting generic content, they’re in the wrong seat. And that’s not a technology problem. That’s a leadership problem that AI can help you solve.
We don’t use AI to fire people; we use it to elevate them.
In my book “The Marketing Leader’s Playbook”, Step 7 focuses on getting The Right People in The Right Seats. Effective AI implementation for marketing teams means strategically pushing your most valuable team members into roles where only they can deliver value, roles requiring judgement, creativity, and strategic foresight that AI cannot replicate.
This shift defines the future of marketing roles: strategic oversight, not tactical execution.
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The “Right People, Right Seats” Framework in an AI-Assisted World
The central philosophy of scaling any successful marketing team is ensuring the Right People (those who share your core values and exhibit grit) are in the Right Seats (roles that maximize their unique skills and passions). AI fundamentally shifts what the Right Seat looks like.
Before the widespread adoption of AI, the “Right Seat” for a skilled analyst required high capacity for data aggregation and synthesis. Today, those tasks are automated. The Right Seat now demands high capacity for judgement, interpretation, and strategic foresight.
Here’s what that shift looks like in practice:
Before AI Implementation:
Content Strategist: 40% strategy, 60% admin (formatting briefs, scheduling posts, updating trackers, writing status emails)
After AI Implementation:
Strategic Content Architect: 80% strategy, 20% oversight (AI drafts briefs, auto-schedules, maintains trackers; human vets quality, steers direction, and makes strategic bets)
(we can make a simple graphic picture of this.)
When we say “3x more strategic”, here’s what we mean: If your content strategist was spending 12 hours per week on execution tasks, AI can reduce that to 3-4 hours. That’s 8-9 hours per week returned to strategy, essentially doubling their strategic output capacity. Compound that across a team of 8 people, and you’ve just created the equivalent of 2-3 full-time strategic roles without hiring anyone.
The goal of AI implementation for marketing teams isn’t to diminish headcount; it’s to strip away low-value, repeatable work so your human talent rises to a strategic level. The process gets automated. The strategic mind steering the ship does not.
Building on the Foundation: From 80% Efficiency to Strategic Elevation
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In a previous article, we talked about using rigor to fix the leaks first and the 1% rule in Kaizen. We covered why you need 80% process efficiency before adding AI and why automating broken processes only gives you faster chaos.
Now let’s talk about what happens after you’ve fixed those leaks: You use AI to capture that Kaizen 1% daily improvement, the compounding efficiency gains that turn admin work into strategic capacity.
By targeting just 1% improvement each day in how your team processes data or drafts materials using AI, you achieve significant marketing process improvement through AI over thirty, sixty, or ninety days. But this only works if your team knows how to interact with AI strategically.
Most teams treat AI like a task rabbit: “Write me a social post about our new product.” The output is generic, requires heavy editing, and delivers minimal time savings. This is where most AI use cases in marketing fail, not because the technology is weak, but because the prompting is lazy.
The CRIT Framework: From Task-Doer to Thought-Leader
Effective AI implementation for marketing teams requires a fundamental shift in how your team interacts with the technology. You need to train AI as a thought partner, not a task rabbit. This is where the CRIT framework comes in an essential concept for marketing process improvement through AI.
CRIT forces your team to prompt strategically:
C – Context (Raw, Real, Messy)
The quality of output depends on the quality of input. Your team needs to give AI the full, messy picture. Instead of typing a quick summary, use voice-to-text to dump all the context, the constraints, the politics, the budget limitations, the stakeholder concerns. Don’t worry about run-on sentences or grammar errors, just voice to text the full context.
Bad prompt: “Write a brief for our Q2 campaign.”
CRIT prompt: “I need a campaign brief for Q2. Context: We’re launching a new feature that took 18 months to build, but early beta feedback shows confusion around the value prop. Sales wants aggressive positioning, Product wants educational messaging, and we have half the budget we had last year. Our target is mid-market SaaS buyers who are drowning in tools and skeptical of ‘innovation’ claims.”
R – Role (Specific Expertise)
Don’t use generic titles. Assign a high-level, specific persona that shapes the AI’s response style and depth.
Bad prompt: “Act as a marketing expert.”
CRIT prompt: “You’re a strategic marketing advisor with 20 years in B2B SaaS, specializing in product launches where internal stakeholders have conflicting priorities. You’ve seen products fail because of messaging misalignment, and you know how to navigate political dynamics.”
I – Interview (The eye-opener)
This step elevates the marketer’s role from order-taker to strategic thinker. Instruct the AI to interrogate you before delivering answers.
CRIT prompt addition: “Before you give me recommendations, ask me 3 questions, one at a time, to deeply understand this situation. Challenge my assumptions and uncover blind spots I might have.”
This forces the human marketer into high-value work: thinking through nuance, articulating constraints, and confronting their own strategic gaps. The marketer is no longer executing tasks, they’re vetting expert-level output.
T – Task (Root Cause Focus)
Demand non-obvious strategies that address root causes, not symptoms.
Bad prompt: “Give me campaign ideas.”
CRIT prompt: “Give me 3 non-obvious strategies that address the root cause of our positioning confusion, not just tactical campaign ideas. Focus on what will create internal alignment and external clarity.”
By enforcing the rigor of CRIT, the marketer transforms into a vetting expert who assesses high-level output and makes strategic decisions. This is a true thought-leader role, and it’s the future of marketing roles.
The Research Director Who Found the Right Seat
Imagine Sarah, a Research Director at a mid-sized B2B SaaS company, was drowning. Her most experienced researcher, the one who could spot emerging market opportunities before competitors, was spending 60% of her time compiling spreadsheets and summarizing competitive intelligence reports.
“I hired her to be a strategist,” Sarah complains. “But she’s basically an expensive data janitor.”
This was a classic “Wrong Seat” scenario where valuable talent was trapped in repeatable tasks.
How did you fix this scenario, you might be wondering?
Train the AI tool on the company’s internal library, competitive reports, and strategic documents. Sarah’s researcher learnt the CRIT framework and used it to prompt AI for the analysis work, defining the data landscape, assigning AI the role of a competitive intelligence analyst, having AI interview her about strategic priorities, then tasking it with identifying non-obvious market gaps.
The Impact:
Time spent on data aggregation dropped from three days to four hours per project. The researcher moved into a new, higher-level Right Seat focused entirely on strategic opportunity analysis, identifying which market movements mattered, which competitors were vulnerable, and where the company should place its bets.
The team didn’t shrink. It shifted its collective output toward proactive growth. This is practical marketing process improvement through AI: AI takes the data burden, and humans take the strategic leadership role.
What If Your Team Isn’t “Strategic Enough”?
Here’s the uncomfortable question you might be asking: “My team is good at execution, but they’re not strategic thinkers. What then?”
The uncomfortable answer: if your team can’t operate strategically even when given the time and tools, you have a talent problem AI can’t fix.
But in most cases, what looks like a lack of strategic thinking is actually strategic talent buried under admin work. Give people the space to think through AI-powered task automation and frameworks like CRIT, and you’ll be surprised what emerges.
If they don’t rise to it after 90 days of having their admin burden removed, then you know you have a development or hiring issue, not a tool issue. That’s valuable information. But you can’t know until you remove the obstacles.
The AI Use Cases in Marketing That Actually Matter
Stop thinking about AI as a replacement for human work. Start thinking about it as a filter that separates strategic work from execution work. Here are the highest-leverage AI use cases in marketing for elevating your team:
Review & Summarization: Meeting notes, research reports, competitive analysis, customer feedback themes
First-Draft Generation: Campaign briefs, email copy, social captions, internal memos, presentation outlines
Data Aggregation: Performance dashboards, cross-platform reporting, trend identification
Strategic Questioning: Using AI to challenge assumptions, identify blind spots, and stress-test campaign strategies
Notice what’s not on this list: final creative output, strategic decision-making, stakeholder alignment, or anything requiring empathy and judgement.
AI accelerates the path to strategic thinking. It doesn’t do the strategic thinking for you.
Your Action Plan: Redefining the Right Seats This Quarter
Step 1: Make CRIT Non-Negotiable
Starting this week, require your team to use the CRIT framework for all strategic AI prompts. No more “write me a blog post” laziness. Context, Role, Interview, Task, every time.
Step 2: Identify the Wrong Seats
List the 3-5 tasks currently consuming your team’s time that could be delegated to AI: report synthesis, first drafts, data aggregation, and meeting summaries. These are the tasks keeping your strategists in execution mode.
Step 3: Measure Strategic Output, Not Just Time Saved
Track the increase in strategic output your human talent achieves after AI implementation, the new campaign concepts developed, the strategic opportunities identified, and the proactive initiatives launched. Time saved is a vanity metric. Strategic elevation is the real ROI.
Step 4: Redefine Job Descriptions
Within 90 days, update role descriptions to reflect the future of marketing roles: strategic architect, not tactical executor. If someone can’t operate at this level once the admin burden is removed, you’ve learnt something critical about fit.
The Bottom Line
The conversation about AI and jobs is the wrong conversation. The right conversation is about AI and seats.
Your team isn’t being replaced by AI. But they are being redefined by it. Leaders who see AI as a way to eliminate headcount will build resentful, anxious teams. Leaders who see AI as a way to elevate talent into their highest strategic capacity will out-execute, out-innovate, and out-strategize everyone else.
The question isn’t whether AI will change your team. It’s whether you’ll use it to make them 3x more strategic or whether you’ll keep them buried in the wrong seats while competitors pull ahead.
Ready to elevate your team from task-doers to strategic leaders?
Get the full methodology in The Marketing Leader’s Playbook at thediggagency.com and learn the 7-step system for getting the Right People in the Right Seats. It’s the exact system we use with marketing teams to transform AI from a task tool into a strategic accelerator.
