For marketing teams anywhere, artificial intelligence has already moved beyond experimentation to become an essential part of day-to-day life.
As a part of the content team, you know how AI in content marketing is a game-changer.
With AI, time-consuming tasks such as topic research, outline creation, content repurposing, and setting up operational workflows for the team go on autopilot. It leaves you time to focus on high-value strategy, storytelling, and thought leadership, among many others.
If you’re still sitting over the fence wondering how content teams use AI, we’ve written this for you.
We’ll also talk about what AI can automate vs. where human oversight/skills come into play.
How Do Content Teams Use AI? Tools, Workflows & Examples
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Role Does AI Play in Content Workflows?
Your strategist sends over a vague brief. The writer creates content using that half-baked outline. And the editor has to rewrite most of it to do justice to the topic at hand. Then, SEO adds a last-minute keyword list.
You’re stuck in an endless loop, and the output is subpar because no one was clear on the content strategy and the topic at hand.
Here’s how AI in content marketing helps you avoid these problems:
- The strategist gets clarity: AI tools help you turn a rough topic into a clear outline with audience insights, trending topics, and different angles to cover. You can then add details such as the intent, the key messaging pillars, and the outcomes you want it to drive
- The writer doesn’t face the blank page syndrome: With a comprehensive brief, the writer has everything needed to get started. AI can help overcome writer’s block, generate multiple variations of headlines or calls-to-action, and adapt content for different audiences or platforms
- The editor has more to work with: If your team is creating content at scale, generative AI and LLM models can give you the first cut. AI can also check grammar and tone consistency. You can then edit and elevate the draft to reflect subject expertise
- SEO is deeply embedded: Generative AI tools support your SEO management process by suggesting keywords based on user intent, internal links, and content gaps that can boost your search performance. With programmatic SEO, you can even create personalized content at scale
- Your brand voice stays consistent: The marketing team, content creation team, social media managers, and SEO strategists all work from the same AI-guided tone, brand identity, and style framework. The messaging is unified across every channel and asset
- Project management is smoother: AI-powered tools can track deadlines, flag bottlenecks, and assign tasks automatically, keeping everyone aligned without the need for constant progress updates or reminders
🚀 AI In Practice: Lane Scott Jones, Zapier’s CMO, observed:
So then, how do they use AI in content? For research, outlines, and workflow automation, but not to write long-form articles.
⚠️ On that note, you must also know what not to use AI for. It includes:
- Research and fact-finding
- Full-length drafts of long-form content
- Final social media posts
- Original artwork or brand imagery
- Data-backed insights or opinions
📚 Also Read: How to Automate Content Creation With AI
Summarize this article for me pleaseHow Content Teams Use AI in Their Daily Work
Ideally, you want to integrate AI into your daily workflows across the content team. This means extending its use beyond just the content creation process. Below, we show you how to do so.
Learn to scale your content production workflows using ClickUp and AI
1. Content ideation and planning
Even in this age of videos, TikTok, YouTube, and ChatGPT, people still have favorite blogs/newsletters that they love to read. If you say something that’s interesting, valuable, and/or entertaining, you’ll be able to stand out.
This starts at the ideation and planning stage. Way before a single word is written.
How AI helps at the ideation and planning phase:
- Spotting demand signals: AI analyzes search trends, audience queries, and social chatter to uncover what people actually care about right now
- Filling the white space: By scanning competitor content, AI highlights gaps where your brand can create something original instead of repeating what’s already out there
- Multiplying angles: From one seed topic, AI can generate variations—SEO-driven or customer-story approaches, amplifying human creativity
- Prioritizing ideas: Generative AI models can score or cluster topics based on relevance, search demand, and potential ROI
- Content calendar jumpstart: Draft outlines and even rough schedules get generated before you’ve written a single line, cutting prep time
❗ Caveat: Be careful of over-indexing on SEO signals based on keywords and volume, and neglecting originality and brand positioning. You need a content strategist’s filter to figure out the sweet spot.
💡 Pro Tip: Use ClickUp Brain for brainstorming ideas, and instantly turn them into structured briefs or calendar-ready tasks.
Brain can summarize research, expand on topic variations, conduct competitor analysis, and even help you draft rough outlines for these ideas.
ClickUp’s One-Up: Sometimes, one AI model won’t cut it. With ClickUp Brain MAX, besides ClickUp Brain, you can access all the premium external large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and more in the same place. Generate creative content, brainstorm ideas, or write meta descriptions without switching tools!
2. Brief creation and outlining
With the topics at hand, how do you maximize the chances of success?
Hint: a kickass content brief.
Whether it’s an internal or an external writer, they need to know the purpose of the planned piece of content, the audience’s problems to address, the product positioning, and other important details.
A content brief communicates all this information in an easy format. By providing everything the writer needs to get started, a good brief helps writers avoid going back and forth with questions and clarifications.
How AI helps in creating a brief:
- SERP and outline analysis: An AI tool can scan top-ranking pages and conduct keyword research to suggest an outline, possible headers, questions to address, and examples to include. It may also highlight what competitors have missed
- Persona and journey mapping: It can tag whether a search query reflects someone at the awareness stage (researching a problem), consideration stage (comparing solutions), or decision stage (ready to act)
- Standardizing briefs at scale: For large teams, AI ensures consistency by including the same core elements in every brief—such as audience, goals, keywords, links, and features to highlight
- Adapting formats: From a single topic, AI can create tailored content briefs for various channels (long-form blog, LinkedIn carousel, and email, for example), reducing duplication of effort
- Meta elements included: AI can propose meta titles, descriptions, and even alt text for search engines while drafting the brief
❗ Caveat: You will still need a content marketer to figure out the intent behind each topic based on customer data. AI can suggest keywords and angles, but it can’t reliably judge whether the searcher wants a quick checklist, a deep-dive guide, or a product comparison.
💡 Pro Tip: Use ClickUp Docs to build and share content briefs and templates. You can quickly generate draft briefs with AI, customize them with your own structure, and collaborate in real time with writers, editors, and the wider marketing team. Using a particular kind of document often? Convert it into a template in a single click!
👀 Did You Know? An Ahrefs survey found that over 87% of marketers use AI to assist with content creation. Companies that use AI publish 42% more content per month compared to those that do it manually.
3. Writing and co-creation
AI accelerates the parts of the writing process that don’t need your deepest judgment.
Your strength as a writer lies in understanding nuance and weaving in emotion. You know how to shift tone, when to pause for emphasis, and when to use analogies.
You also bring the strategic lens, tying the content back to business goals, and checking the facts AI presents.
AI, on the other hand, excels at speed and repetition. You can use it to quickly generate copy or images, and more.
ClickUp’s One-Up: Here are common types of AI-generated content you can start experimenting with. We generated this image using ClickUp Brain 🧠
This video demonstrates how to use Brain to create your content.
How AI helps in writing and co-creation:
- Defeating the blank page: AI helps you generate first drafts of intros, transitions, or supporting paragraphs in seconds
- Style and tone shifts: It can quickly rewrite sections to match your brand’s voice — casual, authoritative, or technical
- Expanding outlines: You can use AI tools to flesh out bullet points into paragraphs, add examples, or suggest FAQs
- Cross-format drafting: AI writing tools can adapt the same brief into a blog, email, or LinkedIn post without starting over
- Variant testing: These tools make it easy to produce multiple versions of headlines, CTAs, or summaries for the team to review
❗ Caveat: AI is known to hallucinate facts and data. Every data, quote, or statistic needs to be cross-referenced for authenticity.
💡 Pro Tip: Use ClickUp Tasks to manage your content creation workflow. Assign writing tasks with attached briefs, set due dates, and use subtasks for drafts, revisions, and approvals. With AI built into Tasks, you can assign comments, generate or refine copy, or update status without leaving the task.
Writers, editors, and marketers can all collaborate in the same thread—so feedback, versions, and final approvals stay centralized instead of scattered across docs and emails. Plus, ClickUp Brain is always at hand to answer questions, so you needn’t trawl through lengthy comment threads!
The social media marketing team at Cartoon Network coordinates its content operations using ClickUp’s Marketing Project Management Software. The platform serves as the team’s single source of truth, establishing trust and accountability and saving time.
Social content moves from ideation to creative and copy review, and then to being ready for publication, without requiring a manager to constantly request updates. Troubleshooting issues is also easier since everyone can see who is responsible for which aspect of the project.
In the words of Sarah Lively, Director of Social Media at Cartoon Network:
4. Editing
Once the writer submits the draft, your content team can run every draft through automated grammar and clarity checks before the editor reviews it in detail.
With this, the editor’s role shifts. They no longer need to fix typos or correct grammar; rather, they will spend more time on the structural clarity and tone of voice, assessing the arguments, and making ethical calls on phrasing and representation.
How AI supports the editing process:
- First-pass cleanup: AI tools can scan your draft for grammar issues, repetitive phrasing, and filler words
- Tone and clarity adjustments: You can maintain a consistent brand voice across writers and formats by using AI to instantly rewrite a section to sound more confident, conversational, or technical
- Structure and flow refinement: AI can highlight abrupt transitions, missing context, or uneven pacing. It’s particularly useful when merging contributions from multiple writers
- SEO and performance tuning: From keyword placement and readability scores to meta descriptions and internal links, AI can recommend small tweaks that make content more discoverable
💡 Pro Tip: Use ClickUp’s Proofing feature to simplify your editorial feedback loop. Editors and team members can directly annotate images, videos, and PDFs within the task.
Editors can highlight specific words, visuals, or frames, tag writers or designers for clarification, and track every edit request in real time. Once revisions are complete, you can mark comments as resolved. Keep every version clean, transparent, and traceable.
For everyone to be on the same page regarding the content operations, ClickUp offers pre-built templates. ClickUp’s Content Management Template integrates strategy, execution, and reporting within a visual dashboard.
This template gives your content team a structured system to plan, organize, and oversee every piece of content from start to finish. Ideas, briefs, drafts, and approvals, all live in one place. Everyone, from writers and marketers to editors, gets visibility on every content asset.
PS: This is the template we use at ClickUp to manage content operations for our blog.
Here’s what Sid Babla, Wellbeing Program Coordinator at Dartmouth College – Student Wellness Center, has to say about using ClickUp for content creation:
If you’re a writer, this will hit a nerve…
To avoid it, we have a solution: ClickUp Brain MAX’s Talk-to-Text.
Record spontaneous thoughts, voice notes, or content ideas on the go, and Brain converts them instantly into structured text ready for editing, expansion, or collaboration. Never lose an idea again because you couldn’t write it down!
5. Content calendar and production tracking
When content moves past editing, the challenge shifts from writing to coordination. Deadlines, dependencies, and distribution plans easily fall apart if there’s no central calendar tracking every moving part of the workflow.
How AI supports production tracking and scheduling:
- Automated scheduling: AI tools can assign due dates based on workload capacity and historical timelines, ensuring no one’s plate is overloaded
- Predictive reminders: AI detects when a task is at risk of delay and nudges assignees or editors before deadlines slip
- Visibility dashboards: AI-generated dashboards give you instant insight into what’s in draft, review, or ready for publishing without manual updates
- Content calendar insights: An AI tool can analyze engagement data to suggest the best publishing times, content mix, or platform frequency
❗ Caveat: Adding every single microtask to the production calendar can overwhelm. Use filters to focus on the stages that matter most (e.g., ready for review, scheduled, published).
ClickUp’s One-Up: Coordination gets easier with ClickUp’s AI Fields. With AI Fields, you can:
- Instantly generate concise task summaries
- Receive automated progress updates on campaigns
- Translate content with a click
- Identify action items without manual effort
These smart features help teams stay organized, save time on routine updates, and ensure everyone is aligned—so you can focus more on creative strategy and less on administrative work.
Combine these with the Board View or Calendar View, and you’ll never have to worry about manually tracking work again.
To make AI tracking truly work at scale, you need a shared space where teams can align on timelines, tasks, and publishing priorities.
ClickUp’s Content Calendar Template is a visual-first planner that simplifies your publishing schedule across teams and platforms.
You can see what’s going live, when, and where, with drag-and-drop cards for each piece of content, color-coded by content type or campaign. Click on any calendar card to access full task details, including channel and content category.
💡 Pro Tip: Automate repetitive tasks, such as content status updates and progress tracking, using AI-powered ClickUp Automations. For example:
- Automatically move tasks forward once a deliverable is approved
- Automatically tag editors when a task’s status changes to ‘Ready for Review’
- Send reminders 48 hours before publish dates
🧠 Fun Fact: People are more likely to consume what they’ve recently paid for, even if it’s the same product or service. A fresh ebook, webinar, or newsletter feels more valuable (and gets read more) when it’s tied to a new offer, time-limited campaign, or moment of decision.
⚡ Template Archive: Free Marketing Plan Templates in Word and ClickUp
6. Content repurposing
Like all other departments, content teams are under constant pressure to do more with fewer resources. At any given time, you are creating content for growth, product marketing, sales enablement, and even employer branding.
So how do you 10X your productivity without losing your sanity?
The quickest way is content repurposing. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, extract more value from what already exists.
For example, a research report can be repurposed as a 5-part blog series, an ebook, a podcast series, or several checklists.
However, manual repurposing is a time and energy-draining activity, which makes it a great candidate for automation.
How AI helps in the repurposing phase:
- Automatic format transformation: Generative AI can convert a blog into a LinkedIn carousel, an email summary, or a short-form video script with prompt-based rewrites
- Tone and audience adaptation: AI copywriting tools can reshape a piece for a different audience segment or channel — professional for LinkedIn, conversational for Instagram, concise for X
- Highlight extraction: it can generate quotes or key takeaways to build short-form assets that link back to your original content
- Topic clustering: AI can analyze your published library, detect overlapping themes, and suggest bundles or series to extend the narrative
- SEO repurposing: Refresh older posts by asking AI to identify missing keywords, new data points, or internal linking opportunities
💡 Pro Tip: Once AI helps you reshape a blog into carousels, captions, or short-form videos, you can plug those assets directly into ready-to-use social media calendar templates.
These templates have pre-built fields for platform, post type, caption, creative, and approval status. Your team can plan, schedule, and collaborate without switching between tools.
7. Performance tracking and content analysis
As any content marketer knows, getting the content and campaigns to go live is just a part of the process. You also have to track their performance and optimize them as needed.
With multiple channels and dozens of metrics, performance tracking often becomes a data overload problem. More so if you’re doing it via spreadsheets or multiple tools for each part of the puzzle.
AI becomes your savior here.
How AI supports performance tracking and analysis:
- Automated data collection: AI can pull engagement, traffic, and conversion data from multiple platforms (Google Analytics, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.) into a single dashboard
- Pattern recognition: AI can identify performance trends over time — for example, which content length drives more conversions or which posting days yield higher engagement
- Sentiment and qualitative analysis: By analyzing comments, feedback, or survey responses, AI can gauge audience sentiment and help your team refine tone, messaging, or topic focus
- Predictive insights: AI can forecast which topics or content types are likely to perform best next month based on historical data, helping you plan content calendars more strategically
❗ Caveat: Performance tracking will not work in silos. Performance data should link to the bigger marketing ecosystem:
- Connect content analytics with CRM data to see which posts influence conversions
- Tie campaign performance to SEO growth and brand searches
- Combine engagement and lead-quality metrics to understand true ROI
💡 Pro Tip: Use ClickUp Dashboards to centralize and visualize all your performance metrics. You can connect data from tasks, Custom Fields, and integrations to track output, timelines, and engagement in one place.
Switch between widgets like bar charts, pie charts, or line graphs to spot bottlenecks and measure campaign success. Add AI cards for more dynamic and instant reporting!
The best part is that you can customize your dashboards for the C-Suite, meaning you don’t waste time converting reports into summaries.
ClickUp’s One-Up: ClickUp Integrations bring your entire content performance universe into one workspace.
- Sync analytics tools: Connect Google Analytics, HubSpot, or YouTube to automatically pull engagement, conversion, and traffic data into your ClickUp Dashboards
- Tie content to pipeline: Integrate with CRMs like Salesforce or HubSpot to trace which content assets drive actual leads and revenue
- Enhance collaboration: Link Slack or Teams so notifications trigger instantly when key metrics change or milestones are hit
- Connect SEO and publishing tools: Integrate with WordPress, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to monitor rankings and publish directly from your workflow
Take it further with ClickUp’s AI Agents that act as built-in AI assistants that automate updates, reports, and answers inside your workspace. They can post daily or weekly summaries, run team standups, or instantly answer content-related queries—all without manual setup.
Summarize this article for me pleaseBenefits of Using AI for Content Teams
Embedding AI into every stage of the content lifecycle helps you in many ways. For instance, AI:
- Reduces mental load by turning vague ideas into concrete next steps
- Maintains creative momentum with AI suggestions right where the work happens, minimizing context-switching and blocks
- Standardizes deliverables with outline generators, briefs, and templates that follow brand voice
- Bridges team silos by giving content strategy, writing, and design real-time visibility into project updates and dependencies
- Adapts content in real time by quickly localizing, simplifying, or reframing content for different audiences and platforms
- Strengthens content governance with AI-assisted tagging, naming conventions, and checklist generation at scale
- Empowers self-service; writers, editors, and marketers can get help from AI without waiting on other teams or tools
Here’s a snapshot of the content production process within ClickUp.
📮 ClickUp Insight: 62% of our respondents rely on conversational AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude. Their familiar chatbot interface and versatile abilities—to generate content, analyze data, and more—could be why they’re so popular across diverse roles and industries.
However, if a user has to switch to another tab to ask the AI a question every time, the associated toggle tax and context-switching costs add up over time.
Not with ClickUp Brain, though. It lives right in your Workspace, knows what you’re working on, can understand plain text prompts, and gives you answers that are highly relevant to your tasks! Experience 2x improvement in productivity with ClickUp!
Summarize this article for me pleaseLimitations of AI in Content Work (and How to Navigate Them)
Despite the many advantages of using AI for content creation and marketing, there are blind spots, such as context misses and IP risks, that you can’t ignore. Here’s where AI tends to fall short and how you can work around these problems.
1. Homogeneous content that bores
With the efficiency offered by AI, millions of businesses are now shipping content at scale. However, platforms are now flooded with similar content that lacks emotional depth. Readers are increasingly tuning out lifeless articles, and brands risk being lost in the background.
✅ An obvious solution to this would be to pair AI with experienced editors who can inject brand stories, unexpected angles, and insider insights.
According to IBM, prompt engineering can also help you while maintaining the same level of efficiency. Here are some techniques:
- Zero-shot and few-shot prompting to give examples that guide the AI’s structure or tone
- Chain-of-thought prompting, which encourages step-by-step reasoning for explainers
- Role prompting, where you assign the AI a persona to add depth and perspective
- Refinement loops let you iteratively build on outputs rather than accepting the first draft
⚡ Template Archive: Free Content Calendar Templates
2. Context blind spots
While AI processes language at an incredible speed, it struggles with cultural subtext, tonal shifts, legal implications, and a brand’s past missteps. This lack of situational awareness can lead to awkward humor, tone-deaf phrasing, or inaccurate content.
✅ Editorial oversight is more critical than ever before. Training the AI is another strategy; you can build prompt libraries baked into your brand’s key contexts. These guidelines can be as explicit as region-specific instructions, audience personas, and taboo topics.
👀 Did You Know? 60% of writers and reviewers say that AI assistants ‘miss relevant context.’ Among those who feel AI affects quality, 44% blame missing context.
3. Intellectual property and ethical minefields
Artificial intelligence remixes vast amounts of online data to generate content and insights. Without clear attribution or source transparency, businesses risk unintentionally publishing plagiarized content. They are also at risk of violating licensed material and failing to credit original creators.
✅ Here’s how you can navigate this challenge:
- Run AI output through enterprise-grade plagiarism and copyright checkers before publishing long-form, research-heavy, or high-visibility content
- Verify licensing when using external material in prompts and restrict to proprietary or rights-cleared data
To know more about how to use AI for marketing, watch this video.
📚 Read More: Brand Guideline Examples for Inspiration
Summarize this article for me pleaseWrite (And Slay) Content With ClickUp
No matter how resourceful your content team is, scaling ideas, keeping briefs on point, and hitting deadlines week after week is a tough job.
ClickUp, the Converged AI Workspace where tasks, documents, conversations, and insights are all present together, brings unprecedented efficiency and visibility to your content operations. With automation, real-time dashboards, AI integrated in tasks and documents, and pre-built templates, you can turn your content team into a productivity hub.
One that everyone in the organization envies. 😀
So, what are you waiting for? Embrace AI and sign up to ClickUp for free today
Everything you need to stay organized and get work done.
