The New AI Marketing Playbook: 5 Founder-Tested Tactics That Save Hours

How companies are using agents and other AI tools to stretch their work.

BY ALI DONALDSON, STAFF REPORTER @ALICDONALDSON

The agents are here. The question is: How are we using them? Founders and their employees are busy experimenting with new AI tools to pinpoint the technology’s most effective use cases. 

Marketing teams have found them particularly helpful in creating content, parsing data, and other tasks that require repetition. While most companies have found it’s still too early to quantify the exact impact in terms of overall cost savings, the impact in terms of time savings is already clear. 

“AI easily saves me 10 to 15 hours a week and lets me focus on strategy instead of busywork,” says Ari McGre, founder of Tactful Disruption, a digital mental health coaching and consulting practice in Chicago, who specifically cited the AI-powered research assistant AnswerThis and the AI-powered presentation maker Beautiful.ai.

Here are the practical ways that founders and their marketing teams are harnessing AI right now.

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1. Brainstorming product names

With only five full-time employees at Oar Health, a virtual care platform that helps users reduce or quit drinking with medication, Neil Walker, the New York City-based company’s vice president, is the only person internally focused on marketing. As a one-man team, Walker says AI allows him “to think things through” and “pressure test ideas.”

That’s been particularly helpful for brainstorming new product names. To label a new compound medication Oar Health started offering, Walker turned to ChatGPT. Within an estimated two to three hours, he says he was able to explore hundreds of options before narrowing the list of potentials down and landing on Clutch. 

“I wanted a hard consonant sound, something that would be strong when said aloud … and rich in metaphor,” says Walker, who found that the vowel sound of Oar Health did not land well in audio advertisements. “What could’ve taken weeks and a branding agency budget was done internally in an afternoon.”

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