The future of content marketing teams: a hybrid collaboration between humans and AI in 2025

What impact is AI going to have on content marketing and your marketing team in 2025? We get this question often and we are happy to share our expectations with you.

Over the past year, we have seen a tentative shift in the way content marketing teams function. Where teams now consist mostly of specialists who perform most tasks themselves, supported by AI, we expect to see more and more hybrid teams in which humans collaborate with full-fledged AI colleagues.

This transformation allows marketing teams to work faster, smarter and more efficiently. As marketing becomes increasingly competitive, it is important to keep evolving with it. In addition, AI offers countless new opportunities not previously available. AI colleagues are playing a big role in this, and we are experimenting a lot with it ourselves.

We discuss what such a hybrid collaboration might look like.

Hybrid teams and the exponential growth of AI intelligence

We expect hybrid teams, in which humans and AI work together, to become the next phase in marketing. AI offers speed, availability, continuity, a rapid infinite learning curve and processing of huge amounts of data. This will increasingly be beyond the reach of humans. 

The knowledge level of the best performing AI right now, ChatGPTo1 preview, is rated at the IQ level 120 (a PhD graduate) in several areas. Most AI researchers expect this level to improve exponentially in the coming years and to be smarter than the smartest humans in all knowledge areas before 2030. Exactly what this will look like and to what extent this will actually be achieved are the subject of divided opinions. This is therefore difficult to predict.

The new role of AI: working smarter and creating space for creativity

What we can say with certainty is that most of the current marketing work is going to largely change in the next year and the years after, and that knowledge and intelligence will become more and more accessible to everyone. At a high speed, improvements in AI are being made and new applications introduced. Virtually all content production such as text, images, audio and video can increasingly be created by AI and reused in other formats. 

For example, think of a written text that you can also record as an audio podcast and vice versa (as we do with our marketing AI Friday newsletter ). You can convert images to videos, and videos, such as webinars, can be converted to written articles and social media posts.

People will therefore have to shift to what we are (still) best at, such as creativity, intuition and strategic thinking skills. But also figuring out how best to use AI and then implementing and optimizing it. 

Collaboration with AI allows marketing teams to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively, freeing up time for a variety of new initiatives and roles.

Let's look at some of the specific roles of AI within a marketing team and how it can work with human marketers.

The roles of AI within the marketing team

In a hybrid team, AI plays a supporting and (increasingly independent) executive role in various marketing tasks. The better the AI gets, the greater this role also becomes. At NXTLI, we have a team of AI colleagues trained in specific aspects of content marketing, making them increasingly supportive of human colleagues. We have also chosen to "humanize" these AI tools by calling them AI colleagues and giving them a name, picture, function and clear role on the team. Our team page lists our current colleagues.

Let's look at some of the roles of AI colleagues on a marketing team.

Customer service and chatbots

One application of AI in a hybrid marketing team is customer service support via chatbots. Instead of one or more people answering all kinds of, often the same questions, a smart AI chatbot can be deployed. At NXTLI, for example, AI chatbot Ian is active on various channels such as our website (you can start a conversation with Ian by clicking on his picture at the bottom right), Instagram DM, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Ian helps customers answer all kinds of questions, is available 24/7 and has no wait times. This ensures that human customer service representatives have more time for more complex issues, while Ian efficiently handles frequently asked questions and basic information.

Smart content planning

Creating a content schedule can be time-consuming, especially if it takes into account important dates, your content strategy, goals and outcomes. People usually don't get around to taking all of these into account. This is where an AI colleague who specializes in creating smart content planning comes in. At NXTLI, AI colleague Pia supports the development of content planning, taking into account, among other things, performance of previous content and key moments of our company and in the market. As a result, we work with a clear plan and create and share the right content at the right time.

Effective captions for social media

Social media is a dynamic and fast-changing channel that often requires new content. An AI colleague specializing in writing social media captions in the right tone-of-voice can help you be that little bit extra when you create a caption. A caption that appeals and is relevant to your target audience. At NXTLI, AI colleague Liza helps write social media captions. Among other things, she takes into account our content strategy, the best practices of the various social media channels and which posts have done well and not so well. Because Liza picks up part of the operational process, we can spend more time optimizing content and working out creative concepts.

Writing website content

Consistently creating quality content for a website can be challenging, especially if it needs to be done on a large scale and meet a variety of guidelines such as SEO, AIO (AI Optimization), tone-of-voice, content strategy and goals. An AI copywriter can take on much of this task. For example, we have Kai who can write blogs, landing pages and other content quickly and efficiently, always aligned with SEO best practices and our tone of voice. This gives us more room to be involved in the creative and strategic side of content development, while Kai takes on much of executive copywriting. We always do apply human checking and, where necessary, we make optimizations to the text.

In addition to further expanding and optimizing our own AI team, we also develop these AI colleagues for our customers. If you are interested in this, we would be happy to work for you as well.

How is the role of human team members changing?

With the advent of AI, the way human team members do their jobs is changing. Where marketers generally still spend a lot of time on recurring tasks such as content creation, plan development, reporting or data analysis, they are going to focus more and more on creative and strategic work and optimizing collaboration with AI colleagues.

The difference for a content manager

An example of this is the role of the content manager. Until now, this role has mainly focused on managing the entire content production process, but in this there is more and more room for creative and strategic thinking. While AI colleagues such as Ian and Pia take care of the executive tasks, content managers can focus on developing new ideas, ensuring brand consistency and responding to changing market conditions.

The difference for a social media manager

In addition, the role of the social media manager in a hybrid team is changing. Tasks such as scheduling content and writing posts can now be largely performed by AI. AI colleagues like Liza help analyze trends, create captions and hashtags and recommend post schedules based on data. 

By using AI, a social media manager can save 30-60% time on tasks such as writing posts, monitoring responses and analyzing results. This allows the social media manager to focus more on strategic growth, building communities and developing unique experiences. AI colleagues, meanwhile, take care of operational execution and continuous monitoring of content programs.

Tip: It is important to identify which roles and tasks within your marketing team will be affected by AI. Make an overview of your team members' current responsibilities and determine how and when AI can support or possibly take over their work. By anticipating this in a timely manner, you can ensure that your team transitions smoothly to a hybrid work environment where AI and human expertise work seamlessly together.

We would be happy to help you with this by developing a Marketing AI Impact Scan.

Working together in a hybrid team: practical examples

What does this collaboration look like in practice?

Suppose your marketing team works together in Slack, Teams or another collaboration platform. On this platform, there are also several AI colleagues with whom you can collaborate, just like with a regular colleague. You can put the AI colleagues to work directly for a specific task, respond immediately, and the AI colleague's responses are also visible to other colleagues who can also engage in the chat (a big difference from all current AI tools where each chat is visible only to the user). 

In addition, you can put several AI colleagues to work one after the other. For example, you first have a content planning made and when it is ready you can immediately have an AI colleague start writing social media captions or blog posts based on that content planning.  

Thus, AI colleagues and human marketers work together optimally to plan and create content, with the human colleagues taking on more of a directing and controlling role rather than doing a lot of this executive work themselves.

See below an example of how we collaborate with Pia and Liza in our Slack environment, for which we fully customized this integration and way of working together.

Additional roles where AI will play a role

In addition to the roles of AI described above in customer service, content planning, content creation and social media, there are numerous other areas where well-trained AI colleagues will play an increasingly important role in the near future. Consider, for example:

• Review and advice on expressions: An AI colleague who reviews a landing page, social post or ad and provides advice to optimize it, based on best practices, content strategy and data from previous expressions that have performed well.  
• Email marketing automation: AI can automate personalized email campaigns, customizing text based on recipients' behavior and preferences. This increases email relevance and engagement.
• A/B testing and optimization: AI can automatically run A/B tests on different marketing programs and make real-time adjustments to get the best results. This significantly speeds up the process of optimization.
• Predictive analytics for customer behavior: AI can predict customer behavior based on historical data and market trends, allowing marketers to respond more proactively to changes in consumer behavior.

In addition, AI is increasingly being used for various operational processes. Think of capturing and summarizing consultations, and writing and responding to emails. Zoom is even going to allow an AI clone of yourself to participate in online consultations.

We see an extremely powerful combination emerging by combining data, content and AI.

Prepare to develop a hybrid marketing team

The transition to hybrid teams in which AI and human colleagues work intensively together is, in our opinion, an important step for content marketing teams in the final months of this year and 2025. NXTLI's AI colleagues like Ian, Pia, Liza and Kai demonstrate how this collaboration is already working in practice. By leveraging the strengths of AI, human marketers can focus on what they do best. These include creative thinking, strategic planning and creating relevant unique content.

These hybrid teams will not only be more efficient, but also better able to respond to rapidly changing market needs. Are you ready for the future of content marketing? We are curious to see how you will approach this and of course we would be happy to help you with this.

In our next webinar "Marketing AI in Practice" on Friday, November 1 at noon, we'll go into more detail about developing a hybrid marketing team. In it, you will see our AI team live in action and we will tell you how you can use these AI colleagues for your marketing team as well.

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