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7/27/26 #ContentChat: Why AI Isn't Saving Your Content Team Time · #ContentChat

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, and welcome back to content chat and to week 10 of our 12-week content foundation series.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Erica Heald.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Over the past nine episodes, we've been building the systems that make scalable, sustainable content possible.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: So we've talked about brand voice, style guide, audience personas, taxonomy, content planning, collaboration, review, and just the ongoing work of keeping your documentation and processes useful.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: But today we're going to be turning to chapter nine, which is harnessing AI to boost content efficiency.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I gotta tell you, this feels like a really timely conversation because the public discussion and the conversations I'm seeing around AI, it's become increasingly polarized.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: So on the one side, we have the people treating AI like a magic wand that can solve every content problem and replace a bunch of people.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: And we all know that's baloney.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: But what I'm increasingly seeing on the other side is that we have people who are treating any use of AI as proof that the work and its creator is somehow fake, lazy, or unethical.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that definitely gives me pause.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: So over the past couple of weeks, I've been seeing writers being publicly called out on social media for using AI, even when the AI use was not for writing their books.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: So in the most recent example I'm thinking of, the author had used AI to help create ads to sell their books.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that's something, you know, I don't have an ad creation uh skill set.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, I've written some copy that somebody has then, you know, turned into an ad, but is that my wheelhouse as a writer?
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Heck no.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: But what really gave me pause is the fact that this writer had used AI to create ads to sell their books, it was that that was treated as a reason to trash the value of everything they had ever written.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: I've also seen people kind of combing through published books looking for supposed AI tells.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, there's the obvious pointing to the M-dashes, which I use M-dashes all the time.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: And let me assure you, I insert them there myself on purpose, just like Ann Hanley, who has an amazing uh an amazing Justice for the M-Dash store, where you can also show your support for the M-Dash while supporting an animal charity, because we all need to do that.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, sorry for the aside.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: So people are pointing to M-dashes, polished phrasing, so good writing, you know, any kind of a sign of good writing as evidence that a machine must have been involved.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: And then the part that actually has charmed me is that people are trolling those claims by finding the same so-called tells in books published decades before generative AI existed, because of course it was good writing that was used to train generative AI on how to write, how to string things together in a way that would be pleasing to us humans.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, now there is also all of the AI detectors that claim they can tell you exactly what percentage of a piece of writing was written by AI, despite all the evidence that these tools can be wildly inaccurate.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: I know I personally enjoy putting in copy that I have just personally written into a tool and seeing whether or not it can tell that a human generated it.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: I also take pleasure in taking some sort of summarized summary content like from one of my podcast recaps and putting it in there and having it tell me that it was 100% human created.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: So these tools, they're not able to tell if something is or is not created by an AI tool.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the reality for content creators, writers, marketers, and just people, human beings who go to work and use a computer, the reality is that AI is already embedded in so many of the tools we use every day.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Grammarly is an AI tool, and I don't just use it in its own standalone app.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: I also have a browser extension for Grammarly.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: So that way, no matter where I'm creating, I'm getting those little pings of, hey, hey, Erica, you know you did a little typo there, you might want to fix that.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm using it all the time.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: Search engines now are using AI.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: Our scheduling, our analytics tools, our design, editing, and productivity platforms, they're all increasingly using AI, whether or not we think about them that way.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, the useful tool is not whether or not somebody used AI, because that's not helpful.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Did AI touch this content?
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: Probably it touched this content.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's not really relevant or valuable.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: To me, the useful questions are: how was AI used?
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Was there a human being clearly and obviously in the loop?
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Did the content begin with human expertise and experience and perspective?
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: And did the use of AI make the work more useful, more efficient, or more accessible without undermining the quality or trustworthiness of the final result?
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's what we should be asking ourselves and the conversations we should be having.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what this chapter in my book is about.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's not about replacing human creativity or rubber stamping, whatever an AI tool produces, because that's silly.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: I may use Grammarly, but I certainly do not accept all of its suggested edits.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: This is all about using AI strategically to improve the parts of your workflow that can slow you down while preserving the judgment, empathy, expertise, and brand identity that makes your content worth reading, the things that make your content yours.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: So today let's focus on four big ideas from the chapter.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: The first one is how to identify where AI can genuinely improve your content workflows.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: Second, how to decide what to automate and where human judgment still matters most.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Third, how AI can help with ideation, optimization, and repurposing.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, why governance and voice documentation are the two core things that allow you to scale AI use without scaling generic off-brand content that just ends up giving you more work on your plate.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: So let's start with something that sounds obvious but gets skipped surprisingly often.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: How do you choose the right AI tools based on the work you actually need to improve?
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: So let me be clear, not every AI tool belongs in your stack.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: I personally use beautiful.ai all the time because I have to create a lot of PowerPoint presentations and I don't have the budget to work with a whiz PowerPoint designer like my friend Sarah who I wish I could have design every presentation that I've ever worked on.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, I use a tool like Beautiful because it works for me.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: It helps make sure that all of my slides are consistent throughout from the front to the back, but that tool might not be useful for you.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: Simply adopting a tool because everyone's talking about it doesn't mean it will improve your content program.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Before you even consider taking on any kind of a tool and evaluating it, you have to first identify, you should rather first identify a gap in your workflow.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: For me, using the beautiful AI example, the gap was I knew that my presentation decks didn't look as polished or consistent as I really wished that they would.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I wanted them to be useful and clear for the audiences that I was sharing them with.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, that was a gap in my workflow.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: I did not have the skills to do that, or the patience, quite frankly, and I didn't have budget to outsource it.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: So using the tool is something that could help me close the gap.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: So for you, you know, maybe you can ask yourself before thinking about what tools you should evaluate, you know, what is it that's really your top challenge?
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: Are you struggling to come up with enough relevant ideas that align with your content strategy and the expectations that your leadership team has for what content needs to be doing for the organization?
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: Or are you sitting on a library of strong content that never gets repurposed, that's one and done in whatever initial format it's created in.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: And let me tell you, I've worked with so many companies where that is 100% a huge problem that they have.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Or another one I see a lot is, you know, hey, are you spending hours writing metadata and summarizing meetings and interviews and or adapting the content that you create for multiple channels?
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: An AI tool that you know has to solve a specific problem like one of these.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, you're just adding another platform that your team doesn't want to learn, another subscription that your budget can probably barely pay for, and another place where your team can create inconsistent work.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: So it's just, you know, adding more chaos on top of our day-to-day normal chaos.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the patterns I've seen is a team trying an AI tool once, getting a disappointing result, and then concluding that AI is just simply not useful for them and the way that their organization works.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: But frequently, I'm sorry, it's not the tool that was the problem.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that AI isn't going to be useful for them.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Often it's that the tool was not given a clear use case, useful source material, or enough context to succeed.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that's something I've spent a lot of time thinking about and talking with others about over the last uh four months in particular.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why I recommend starting with just one use case at a time and figuring out what spectacular, what particular AI can bring to the table.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: So start by choosing a task where you need more speed or capacity and where the risk is relatively low.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: So that might be generating the first round of headline ideas for a blog post, summarizing a long interview transcript, drafting some metadata, or giving it a nice piece, a nice juicy piece of content, and identifying the best opportunities to repurpose that asset for your other channels.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: Then evaluate whether the tool actually made that part of the process that you were free previously struggling with a little easier.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Think about whether or not it fits into the way your team already works.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: Are you going to be able to commit to giving it the context it needs in order to give you good outputs?
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Is it going to reduce the amount of time you spend on the task, or does it just create another layer of cleanup?
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: And can your team review the output effectively?
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: For me, the best AI tool is not necessarily the one with the most impressive demo or the one that you've heard the most of your colleagues talking about.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to be the one that fits seamlessly into your workflow and integrates with the tools you're already using to help your team produce better work with less friction.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: This is also why ongoing use is what matters so much more than just the initial adoption.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Purchasing access to an AI tool does not create value on its own.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: You still have to have those good inputs, those clear instructions, human review, and a way to measure whether or not it's improving efficiency or quality.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because if it's not doing that, it's not useful.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: If you can't explain what problem a tool is solving, how it will be used, and how you're going to evaluate the results, you're probably not ready to add it to your workflow.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: You're not at that point of content strategy maturity where you should be introducing AI tools.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: You have other foundational things that are going to be a lot more critical for you to work on.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: So the second thing I focus on in chapter nine is learning what to automate and what needs a human.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Because I'll tell you, despite the fact that we're seeing lots of people talking about agents, for example, most of us are so not ready to have agents involved in our content workflow.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: AI can speed up a lot of content work, but automation is not the same thing as autonomy.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: So just because a tool can, you know, polish or draft a blog post or rewrite an email for you or generate social copy 100% does not mean that it should do that work without oversight.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: That would be horrible.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: You do not want that.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: We have seen so many examples where chatbots, for example, have gone rogue and said all sorts of horrible things to our communities.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: You don't want that.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: For content teams, for marketing teams, AI is going to be strongest.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: The value of AI is going to be the strongest when the task is repetitive, mechanical, structured, or data heavy.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: It can just transcribe an interview.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: This is something I have been using auto to do for years.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Where, you know, it can also summarize meeting notes and send out that summary of the meeting notes and a link to the transcript.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: It can identify repeated themes across a set of documents.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: It can create a first pass outline, suggest metadata or reformat a piece for a different channel, or help organize a large amount of information, all depending upon what it is you can give it as source material.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: And these are all valuable uses because they reduce friction.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: They give the human creator more part, more time for the parts of the work that require judgment, perspective, and need to have a human touch in order to actually resonate with and engage your audience.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'm definitely seeing all of this in my own consulting work right now.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm working through a content governance discovery process that includes a very large amount of public, non-confidential information.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: There's more material there for us to get through than the client's budget or my available time would allow us to review manually at the same level of depth.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: We've done all sorts of crawls, we have SEO data, we have all of this stuff to use as part of our process, and certainly not enough time to go through it at depth.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: We're able to use AI to identify themes, patterns, inconsistencies, and areas that deserve closer attention.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: And it helps me get oriented faster so I can make better use of the time that they do have.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because let me assure you, having me go in and manually map 8, 9, 10 different language versions of something in a content inventory is not a good use of my time or my billable hourly rate.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: That is silly.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's a perfect use case for AI.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: All of this said though, AI in these situations is not going to make any final recommendation.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't understand the organization's internal policies, the business priorities, history, or any of the nuance of what stakeholders mean when they describe a problem.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: It just gives us another way to examine the information that we have.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: The human analysis is still essential.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: The AI just helps us get there a little bit faster.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: And for me, the same distinction applies to content creation.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: AI can help you brainstorm possible angles, but it can't decide which angle is most credible for your brand.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: Only you, as that person within your organization, can do that.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: Only you have that ability to make that judgment.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: AI tools can suggest revisions, they can suggest edits, but they can't always understand why a sentence that breaks a rule sounds more human or more true to your voice.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: For example, AI is always trying to avoid contractions.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: But what if you have a friendly, approachable, casual brand voice?
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: Then you're gonna be using contractions.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: You're not going to say cannot and would not, because it's gonna sound weird.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be off-brand for you.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: But the AI doesn't know that unless you tell it.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: AI can summarize an interview, but it also cannot replace the lived experience and expertise of the person you interviewed or that you brought into conducting that interview.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be able to generate a pretty competent, rough draft, but competence is not the same thing as insight, originality, emotional resonance, or trust.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: Those things all have to come from you, the human being that is working and collaborating with the AI tool.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: So anytime you have more strategic and creative, sensitive or public-facing work, that's the situation where it's so important to have the human ownership in place.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: For example, AI should not at all be given the lead for your brand messaging, for any kind of executive communications, for thought leadership, for customer stories, or any kind of content that has legal, ethical, or reputational risk attached to it.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: All of these are areas where you may have AI do some coaching and give you some feedback, helping you make sure that what you're creating is going to be getting the results that you want, but they hundred 100% should not be the ones making the final judgment.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: So my rule of thumb is pretty simple: use AI to accelerate repeatable tasks, and use humans to own meaning, judgment, and connection.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: You also need to always ask who's accountable for the final result.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: If no human owns the output, you do not have a content process.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: You have an automation risk.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: So the third other major focus in the chapter is how to use AI to refine and remix versus creating content from scratch.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, I feel it's really important that AI shouldn't begin with a blank page.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, using AI ensures that you do not have to begin with a blank page.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: For me, most of the useful and effective AI use cases, they begin with really strong human-created source material.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: So when you have that, you can go to AI and it can help you get that additional value from the research you've conducted, from interviews when you have transcripts, from presentations, webinars, articles, and customer insights you've already created.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's so useful for being able to take the template for the how things should look and what good looks like in your organization and combining it with that source material and giving you, again, that strong first draft to speed you along.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: But the AI was not coming up with that content wholesale.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: It was creating derivative content by remixing what you already have.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when it comes to writer's block in ideation, AI helps break through that blank page paralysis by generating headline variations or some angles or some questions that your ideal customer or consumer of the content might ask.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: They can also help you come up with content clusters around an already established theme if you're trying to figure out how to bridge from one topic to another.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: But you're still going to have to be the human being.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: You are going to have to sort the useful ideas from the stale, generic, or off-brand ones.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: So in the chapter, I compared it to my beloved um cat, Mr.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: Bill, who has been gone from this earth for a very long time, but it was so relevant when I was writing this.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: He was really good at spitting out stale pieces of his cat food because they were not worth his time.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: And AI is equally good at spitting out stale content ideas.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: Your job is to recognize them and figure out what you can do in order to have fewer of them.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: So for optimization, AI can serve as a great first pass developmental editor.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: It can help you shorten or expand content for a particular channel, suggest alt text, draft SEO titles and meta descriptions, because we human beings don't really need to be doing that.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: We're not good at it, and we don't know how to write it in a way that's going to help it get our content into the hands of the right people.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's also really good for helping us flag places where writing is hard to follow or where we're making some assumptions about things somebody might know that in fact the person that we're trying to reach with the content doesn't know.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: I personally love to use AI as a coach.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: I can give it the content brief, the intended audience, and the objective, and then ask it how well one of my drafts meets those requirements and where the alignment could be stronger, and ask it to give me a grade and then how I can improve from there.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not asking it to revise my content in order to make it better and give it an A grade, but I'm saying where did I miss?
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: What have I forgotten?
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: So that I, the human Being can go back and make what I created stronger.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's a very different from asking it to just make the content better without a definition of what better means.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's just like when you would get those comments from human reviewers back in the day of, you know, just can you just jazz this up?
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: No, I cannot add jazz hands to that.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, AI has is really there to smooth away your rough edges, not to sand away your brand voice.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: I really think that repurposing is probably the highest leverage use case for AI because a strong human-created piece of content can become a newsletter introduction, several social posts, a short video outline, a webinar description, a sales enablement summary, or a carousel.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: And AI is going to help you create those first-past adaptations of your great human-generated content a lot more quickly than any of us could go in and even start all of our blank from scratch templates.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: The important part when for me when thinking about how to use AI and where to bring it in, is you're not ever asking it to invent your expertise.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: You're giving it your expertise and you're asking it to help package that expertise for another format, channel, audience, or stage in the buyer journey.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: You're asking it to use the knowledge it has accumulated to make your particular valuable perspective make it better, make it more accessible, make it be something that is worth the human being that you're trying to engage it with, make it worth their time.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: This is really how small teams are able to increase their output without asking people to recreate every asset from the beginning.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: I cannot stress this enough.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: I did an entire workshop for marketing props, a two and a half hour workshop on how to train AI on your brand so that way you can be giving the right kinds of instructions with enough context.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you provide a pretty generic prompt and a weak original asset, your repurposed content is going to be generic too.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to do better.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: The real scale, the real value of using AI for scaling content, it comes from combining strong source content, clear systems, and AI assistance.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: It does not come from flooding every channel with more undifferentiated content.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: So my fourth and final point is governance is what makes AI scalable.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: And without it, you're just not going to be able to scale content with AI no matter how much money you spend.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: AI does not make your brand more consistent.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: It takes whatever is already present and it makes that easier to repeat.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: So you can point it at your website, but I guarantee you, your website is not consistent.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't necessarily reflect the up-to-the-moment standards of what your brand is and who you're trying to reach.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, it's going to be a lot more like a Frankenstein or a patchwork quilt where there's some things that are very on brand and there's some things that have been up on that website since it went up on that platform in the first place, which could have been 10 years ago or even more.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now, on the other hand, if your brand voice is clearly documented and you have a style guide, AI has something concrete to work from.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: If you have audience personas in place that explain who you're trying to reach and what they care about, then AI can help adapt content more thoughtfully and give you a lot less rework.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: When you have your taxonomy, you have your content, uh templates by platform and content type, you have creative briefs and editorial standards documented, and they're things that people are using to create great content today.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's when AI can produce work that fits into your content operations instead of creating a separate steam of stream of disconnected drafts that just give you more editing work.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: When those systems are missing, you know what happens because we've all seen it.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: AI is just a crappy AI content vending machine.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: You put in a generic request and get back something polished looking, but pretty much interchangeable with what everybody else is publishing.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: The equivalent of the boring SEO optimized uh article that was plopped on your website and never shared because it was just there to try to trick search engines into getting the right customer to your website.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: The deal is this is why governance is the multiplier that makes AI useful.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: Governance is going to define the rules of the road.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: It establishes the voice and tone standards, it shows the AI what templates have in place, what good looks like for each one of those templates, shows all of the approved AI use cases, and makes it clear what your expectations are of what you're asking the AI to do.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it keeps you honest about where human oversight is mandatory.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: So that way there's no guessing or no back and forth on Slack and email.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: Governance also gives your team permission to experiment.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I know people are always like, what do you mean?
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: Having rules and guidelines and guardrails.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: How on earth does that give me more room?
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's just, you're just being the brand police, Erica.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: You're just making it harder to do my job.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think so.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I say that as somebody who's been creating content for a very, very long time.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: When people know what the boundaries are, and when they don't have to keep a bunch of random, disconnected style information in their head and personal preferences based upon who is going to review whatever the content is, that's when people are able to be so much more creative.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: And that's also when they're going to be able to use AI tools with more confidence.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: That way they don't have to guess whether a task is appropriate for them to be using AI or what information is allowed to be shared with which tool or who has to review the output.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: None of those are things that a human should have to be thinking about.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: It should be documented and be something that's built into your AI tools.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: In the book, I walk through my AAA content governance framework because it applies here pretty directly.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: So it has three A's, right?
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: The first one is align, and that's connecting AI use to your strategy, audience, brand purpose, and your brand voice before anybody starts prompting.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: Approve, the second A, is about integrating AI into real workflows, defining where it can be used, where it should not be used, what review is required, and what quality standards apply.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: And the final A is amplify, which is using AI to extend the reach and the value of content that is already working.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: So that's going to include repurposing, refreshing evergreen content, personalizing within brand boundaries, and improving your prompts based upon what your team learns over time about what AI has done really well for you and what kind of context it needs.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: The goal is not ever to control every word or to prevent people from using AI.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's not why you put content governance into place.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: The goal with content governance is to make sure that the way everyone uses AI supports your content strategy and is consistent so that way it protects the trust you've built with your audience over time.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you break that trust, you're not going to be able to get it back.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: AI can help you move faster, and governance makes sure that you're moving in the right direction and that you're not breaking a bunch of things that aren't going to be able to be replaced.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: Brand voice remains that signature that makes the result recognizable as yours.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, so your AI toolkit, it needs to include a lot more than a collection of clever prompts.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: It has to include your voice and tone guidance, audience context, templates for all of the major types of content you create across the different platforms that you use, quality standards, and examples of what strong and weak content look like for your brand.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: When it has all that context, that's when AI is really able to shine in what it can do for your team.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: The more specific and usable that documentation is, the less time you and your team will have to spend cleaning up output that was never pointed in the right direction.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: So with all of this in mind, here is a practical way to get started.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: If you're still in the experimentation stage in your relationship with AI, you do not need to overhaul your entire content operation at once.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, start with that one low-risk, high-value use case.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: Choose a specific task such as generating title options or headline options, summarizing meetings or interviews, drafting metadata, reviewing content against your style guide, or repurposing an existing article.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: Give the tool as much context as you have.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: At a minimum, you're going to want to make sure that includes the audience, the objective, so basically the job that you're trying to do with that content, the format and any format-specific frameworks, guidelines, guardrails, brand voice guidance, and examples as relevant.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: And you have to assign a human to be responsible for reviewing that output.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: You don't just generate it, copy-paste it, and send it along.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then, and this is the most important part, then you have to measure what happened.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: Did the task take less time?
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_00: Did your review process become easier or harder because you involved AI in the process?
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: How much rewriting or revision was required?
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: Did the output meet your voice quality, accessibility, and SEO standards?
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_00: These are just a few of the really common low-hanging fruit use case KPIs that I use pretty frequently.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: So you can use what you learn from doing these small, easy tests to refine your instructions, update your documentation, and decide whether or not that use case should be part become part of your regular workflow with how you use AI on your team.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that feedback loop is absolutely essential and it gets skipped way too often.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: You're not just using AI, you are teaching your team how to use it better and strengthening the systems about it with every single use of AI by your team.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're not doing this consistently, and if everyone is not referring to the same documentation and standards, then you have a bunch of people training a bunch of different AI tools on completely different ways of representing your brand, which is barely controlled chaos.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that is not useful or valuable.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_00: So in close, if you take only one thing from chapter nine, I hope it's this.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's about being intentional about where AI can remove friction while keeping people accountable for your strategy, meaning, your voice, and your trust.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: You always still have to have those humans in the loop and have content be human-led, human first.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_00: AI can help you work faster.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: It can help you analyze more information, explore more ideas, improve existing drafts, and get more value from the content you've already created.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: That is so amazing.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: But you're not going to get there and get those awesome results that save you so much time and make you look like a rock star unless your AI is well guided.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: So that means choosing your tools based on real workflow needs, starting with focused use cases, giving AI strong inputs, keeping humans in the loop, and building governance into the way work gets done across the team.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: So the objective is not to produce the most content.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need to produce 50 blog posts a month.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's not something, that's not a goal you should have.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's not about the quantity.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: It is all about building a more efficient, brand safe content tool that gives your team more time for the work that only humans can do.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's the stuff that's fun and that's interesting and that we should be focused on as people.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: So if you want to go deeper, chapter nine of Content Foundations includes the full decision framework for determining what to automate, practical examples for ideation, optimization, and repurposing, my AAA governance model applied to AI, and a step-by-step approach for evaluating, integrating, and measuring AI tools.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: Next week, in week 11 of the series, we'll move into chapter 10, expanding your content team.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: We'll talk about how to recognize when you need more support, how to choose between in-house hires, freelancers, agencies, and fractional experts to make sure you're picking the right resource for the project, and why adding more people only works when you also have the systems and documentation that help them contribute effectively.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, that's it for this week.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for joining me, and I will see you next Monday.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: Bye.