Everybody's in a rush to AI-ify their business right now. And honestly, I get it. I'm doing it too. The tools are getting better, the use cases are multiplying, and the promise of doing more with less is hard to ignore.

But here's the thing:

Just because you can AI-ify something doesn't mean you should.

So, I want to play a little game I've been calling "Should You AI-ify That?" I'll cover13 things you might be considering automating or handing off to AI in your marketing, with my gut-check yes or no and the reasoning behind it.

Fair warning: I'm talking about whether you should, not whether you can. I'm positive you could AI-ify a lot of these, but these are my opinions on whether it's the right play.

Also, there are a lot of "yes, buts" and "no, buts" in here. That's because AI is nuanced. It's not a magic button. Every situation has a million ingredients, and what works for one business might not work for yours. So take these as starting points, not gospel.

Last disclaimer: this was written in February 2026, so who knows? I might be wrong or have changed my mind by May. This is how I'm feeling now.

That all said, let's get into it.

1. Content Strategy — No (But...)

My gut instinct? No, you should not AI-ify your content strategy.

Your strategy is personal. It's tied to your brand, your audience, your sales process, your positioning, your goals — all the nuance that makes your business yours. If you just ask AI to build you a generic content strategy, that's exactly what you're going to get: something generic. And generic doesn't move the needle.

The but: if you have all of the inputs — your brand guidelines, your audience profiles, your competitive landscape, your sales data — and you can feed those into AI in a meaningful way, then yes, it can help you assemble and structure a strategy that actually makes sense. AI can also be useful for competitor research and trend analysis as part of that process.

But don't go into a strategy session thinking AI is going to do it for you without those inputs. It won't. This one requires a human-first approach, with AI as a supporting player.

2. Your Newsletter — No (But...)

Hot take alert: I don't think you should AI-ify your newsletter.

I've tried. Multiple times, for multiple clients. And every time, I've run into the same wall: the stuff that makes a newsletter good — curating the right links, finding relevant news, knowing what your audience actually wants to read, capturing your brand's personality, sharing what's happening in your space — is really hard to outsource to AI.

If you're featuring member stories, curating industry links, sharing company news, or putting your own spin on what's happening in your world, you still have to do all of that legwork yourself. You still have to gather the pieces and you still have to know your audience's taste.

The but: once you have all those pieces assembled, AI can absolutely help you put them together, clean up the copy, and tighten the structure. Think of it as a finishing tool, not a starting tool.

Bottom line for newsletters: human-led, AI-augmented. Not the other way around.

3. Blog Content — Yes

This one's a pretty clear yes. If you're running a blog, you should absolutely be using AI to help you create that content.

Now — the caveat, because there's always a caveat — you cannot just ask AI to write you an article about a topic and call it a day. If you do that, you're contributing to the mountain of AI slop that's already flooding the internet. Nobody needs more of that.

What you can do is give AI high-quality inputs, unique perspectives, your own insights and experiences, and specific examples and frameworks. When you do that — when you give AI something real to work with — it can produce blog content that's genuinely valuable, sounds like you, and actually serves your audience.

The quality of your output is directly tied to the quality of your input. Always.

4. Social Content — Yes

Same wheelhouse as blog content: yes, with the right parameters in place.

Don't just use AI to create random, ad hoc, directionless social posts. Your audience will see right through it — and even if they don't consciously clock it as AI-generated, they'll feel the lack of intention behind it. It's noise, not signal.

But if you have a clear social strategy, a defined brand voice, and the ideas and perspectives you want to communicate? AI can help you execute on all of that faster and more consistently than you could manually. Give it the right brief, and it becomes a serious time-saver.

5. Creative (Images and Visuals) — Yes (If You Know What You're Doing)

I'd say yes to AI-ifying your creative — with one significant caveat: you need to learn how to use the tools properly.

There's a difference between AI-generated imagery that looks polished and intentional, and imagery that screams "this was made by a robot in 30 seconds." That difference comes down to how well you know how to prompt and refine the tools. It takes some practice.

That said, the use cases are genuinely useful. Hero images for blog posts. Social media graphics. And here's one I find particularly interesting for coworking spaces specifically: if you have photos of empty rooms or offices that you want to make look more inviting and lived-in, AI can help add people, movement, and life to those images. One photo, two purposes. That's a smart way to stretch your existing assets.

6. Technical Email Elements (Automations and Flows) — No

I want to be clear about what I mean by "technical email elements" here — I'm not talking about the actual written content of your emails. I'm talking about the logic: the automations, the flows, the sequences, the triggers, the decision trees.

Should you AI-ify that? No.

Here's why: building a solid email automation system requires a deep understanding of your audience's journey. Who they are before they become a member. What happens after they convert. What specific behaviors should trigger which emails and when. That logic is complex, it's specific to your business, and it's very easy to get wrong.

Unless you can feed AI every conceivable input about your audience, their behavior, and your systems, you're not going to get the right logic out of it. This is a human-led task.

(More on the written side of email in a second — that's a different story.)

7. Email Content (Broadcast Emails and Sequences) — Yes

Okay, so here's where I separate the two halves of email.

The logic of your automations? Human. The written content that goes into them? AI, all day.

Once you've done the strategic work — you know what your email flow looks like, who it's going to, when, and why — you can use all of that context to have AI create the actual email copy that populates the sequence. Same goes for broadcast emails: promotional offers, event invites, member correspondence. Give AI the right inputs and frameworks, and it can produce quality emails that save you a significant amount of time.

The key, as always, is knowing what "good" looks like. You have to understand what a high-quality email looks like in order to recognize when AI has nailed it (or hasn't). If you have that foundation, absolutely AI-ify your email copy.

8. Member Spotlights, Team Interviews, and Expert Features — No (for Source), Yes (for Output)

This is a nuanced one, so let me break it into two parts.

The actual interview, the relationship, the questions, the conversation — that's human. I haven't met a person in the world who wants to be interviewed by a robot. And even if you're using a questionnaire instead of a live interview, you still need to write the questions, populate the form, understand what information you're trying to get and why. That requires knowing your subject, your brand, and what story you're trying to tell.

So: no, don't AI-ify the source.

But once you have that source material — the transcript, the answers, the raw interview — that's what I call "asset zero." And from asset zero, AI can help you create a multitude of outputs: the blog post, the social media captions, the email feature, whatever it might be.

The human gets the material. The AI helps you scale it.

9. SEO — No (for Strategy), Yes (for Content)

Trust me, I've tried to AI-ify SEO. Many times. In many different ways.

It doesn't work.

AI doesn't have reliable access to the keyword data and search volume metrics you need to make real SEO decisions. When I've tried to use it for keyword research or SEO strategy, it comes back with guesses, not data. And making strategic decisions based on AI guesses is a great way to waste your time and your content budget.

So: no, do not AI-ify your keyword research or SEO strategy. Use a proper SEO tool for that.

However — and this is a big however — once you have your keywords and you understand how to structure SEO content (keyword density, article structure, how to optimize for AEO as well as traditional SEO), then AI can absolutely help you create that content. Feed it your keywords, your topic, your framework, and it can produce content that performs.

The intelligence still has to come from you. AI is the executor, not the strategist.

10. Marketing Analytics — Yes (for Gathering), No (for Interpreting)

You can absolutely AI-ify the gathering of your marketing analytics. There are agents and tools that can pull data from Google Analytics, your email platform, your ad accounts — and consolidate all of that in one place, fast. That's genuinely useful and worth setting up.

Where I'd pump the brakes is on letting AI interpret those metrics for you.

I've tried that too, and it kind of gets it — but only kind of. There's too much context that lives outside the data: the nuances of your business, your audience's behavior patterns, the specific initiatives you're running and why. AI can surface the signals, but it doesn't always know what those signals mean for your specific situation.

Use AI to gather. Use your brain to analyze. Get the best of both.

11. Your Marketing Department — Maybe

This one's a bit loaded, so let me be specific about what I mean.

If the question is "should I fire my marketing people and replace them with AI?" — no. Absolutely not. Even if you found someone with a broad enough skill set to cover everything from Google Ads to content and beyond(which is already rare), that person still needs deep enough expertise in each area to use AI well enough to match what a specialist would produce. That's a very high bar, and most generalists can't clear it. Even full-time specialist hires are hard enough to get right.

If the question is "should I be using AI tools and systems to make my marketing team faster, more efficient, and more dialed in?" — yes. A thousand percent.

The message here isn't "AI can replace your people." It's "AI can make your good people significantly more productive." Look for tools and systems that optimize their workflows, reduce the time they spend on repetitive tasks, and free them up to do the thinking that AI genuinely can't do.

Don't replace. Amplify.

12. Thought Leadership — No (for Strategy), Yes (for Distribution)

Thought leadership is kind of a combination of everything we've talked about, so the answer follows the same pattern.

The strategy behind your thought leadership — what you're putting out there, why, what funnel it feeds into, what action you want someone to take — that's human. The ideas themselves, the perspectives, the insights that make your thought leadership worth following? Also human. You need to be the one recording, writing, and capturing the raw material that makes it yours.

But once you have that source material? Once you have asset zero? AI can turn one idea into a multitude of assets — blog posts, social content, emails, YouTube scripts, podcast show notes, wherever you're distributing. That's where AI absolutely earns its keep.

Which brings me to the bonus I didn't plan to include but thought of mid-recording:

13. Content Distribution — Yes (Full Stop)

This is a big, resounding yes.

If you have a single piece of source material — an idea, an interview, a recording, a transcript — AI can help you turn that into a full content distribution strategy across every channel you're active on. Blog. Email. LinkedIn. Instagram. YouTube description. Podcast show notes. Whatever.

And once you've trained AI on your brand voice and built the right frameworks, it can do that in a fraction of the time it would take to do manually.

If you're not using AI to amplify your content distribution, you're leaving a lot of time and reach on the table.

It's not "AI everything" and it's not "AI nothing." It's knowing which parts of your marketing need human intelligence at the helm, and which parts can be meaningfully accelerated with AI as the engine.

The pattern you'll notice across all 12: AI works best when it has great inputs, a clear framework, and a human who knows what "good" looks like to review the output. It doesn't work well when it's being asked to make strategic decisions, gather real-time data, or replace genuine human relationships and expertise.

Know the difference. Use the tools wisely. And don't AI-ify the things that actually need you.

Want to learn how to use AI for creating blog, email, and social content, fast, on-brand, and without sacrificing quality? Check out my course: D(AI)Y Content Marketing for Coworking Spaces. Or, if you'd like help AI-ifying the right elements of your content marketing, book a free consultation today.