AI marketing: how it works, with real examples

Updated on October 19, 2026: data reviewed and updated.

If you are not using AI marketing yet, you may already be falling behind. AI tools are becoming more and more common, and many of them now come with features designed specifically to help marketers promote their products and services more effectively.

In this article we take a close look at AI marketing: the benefits of applying AI, how AI is actually being used in practice, and a handful of AI tools that will help you get started with artificial intelligence.

Key takeaways

• AI brings marketing teams several benefits: it speeds up repetitive tasks, provides deeper insight and improves overall performance.
• You can use AI for content planning and creation, competitor analysis, customer experience and many other activities.
• There are plenty of AI tools that help you automate processes and streamline your marketing strategy.

Benefits of AI marketing

The obvious question is why you should bring AI into your marketing strategy at all. Used the right way, these tools promise to deliver a long list of benefits for your team.

Faster workflows

AI helps marketers speed up their workflows and cuts a large share of the time spent on manual tasks. According to HubSpot’s State of AI Report, 79% of marketers say AI helps them spend less time on manual work.

Better personalization

AI can analyze customer data at a large scale, which helps you pull out more insight and understand how to personalize content and how to segment your customers. Better personalization, in turn, makes a noticeable difference to how well your marketing campaigns perform.

More specific insights

Because AI can analyze data far beyond what a person can, it delivers more accurate and more valuable insight. For example, AI can help you spot trends early, forecast sales and customer behavior more reliably, and support your marketing team in making more accurate decisions.

Lower costs

Building AI into your team’s workflow saves time and resources and brings marketing costs down. AI does not replace people in their core roles, but it can take over the repetitive tasks, which leaves your team free to focus on the activities that have a direct effect on revenue.

Higher return on investment (ROI)

AI helps marketing teams understand customers better, personalize campaigns and create more effective content, and all of that raises ROI. Start applying AI to your day-to-day work now to improve your overall performance.

9 ways to use AI in marketing

Because AI is still relatively new, you may not yet fully understand how AI and marketing fit together. In reality, though, there are many important applications that AI can help you make the most of.

• Content planning: An AI chatbot can be a very useful partner for coming up with content ideas. Tell the chatbot about your business and your overall content goals, and ask it for topics you have not covered yet. After that, you can use an SEO tool to find the right keywords and develop your content around them.
• Content creation: AI should not handle the whole content creation process, but it is still a capable assistant. You can use AI to outline an article, suggest an introduction or draft a summary that you then use as the base for expanding the piece.
• Marketing automation: Plug AI tools into your marketing automation workflows to raise your team’s productivity. An AI tool can work as one step inside a workflow, or it can help you set up entirely new workflows, and either way efficiency goes up.

• Customer service: AI can be a real help in customer care. Put an AI chatbot on your website to help answer customers’ basic questions, and have it pass the bigger issues on to your staff. That way your customer care team only handles the larger, important issues that genuinely need a human, while AI answers all the smaller questions.
• Audience segmentation: AI tools can analyze large volumes of customer data and help you segment your audience far more effectively than your team could by working through the information by hand. Segmentation then helps you build campaigns and personalize your marketing.
• Social listening: Bring AI into your social media marketing strategy to analyze data faster, read sentiment and overall reactions, and produce summaries of customer conversations. With that support, your social listening becomes more accurate and more effective.

• Competitive analysis: With its strong data analysis capabilities, AI is a very useful tool for digging up competitor insight. You can compare competitors’ performance against your own and analyze market trends to anticipate what may happen next.
• Predictive analytics: In the same way, AI can predict customer behavior by analyzing past campaigns and forecasting results from historical data. As a result, you can build new campaigns that work better right from the start.
• Administrative tasks: AI is also very handy for basic admin work such as data entry, scheduling and pulling reports. Handing manual jobs to AI frees up time for your team to focus on more important work.

3 AI marketing examples

Below are some real-world examples of how businesses apply AI to market their products and to make the customer experience more engaging.

Spotify

Spotify, the music streaming platform, launched its AI DJ feature (in beta since February 2023) to personalize the listening experience. The DJ picks a lineup of songs based on your taste and drops in short commentary about the tracks and artists in a very natural-sounding voice.

If a listener is not feeling it, they just tap the DJ button to switch to a different genre, artist or mood.

This experience creates a clear point of difference and helps Spotify stand out from the other music streaming platforms.

Curlsmith

Curlsmith is a brand that specializes in care products for curly hair. It has a chatbot built right into its website, with the aim of helping customers quickly find the exact products they need.

As you can see, every chatbot reply is labeled “Automated by AI.” Customers can use the chatbot to:

• Find products suited to their curl type
• Check a recent order
• Ask questions about shopping with Curlsmith
• Ask about discounts
• Change an order

Some of the replies are preprogrammed, but if a user says they need more help, a conversational AI chatbot takes over the support role. This chatbot analyzes the user’s responses in order to give the most relevant answer, which raises the overall quality of customer service.

Heinz

In 2022, Heinz ran a creative ad campaign and used AI to build it. The ad tells the story of how the Heinz team typed the word “ketchup” into an AI image generator, and what came back was a bottle of ketchup with a logo that looks just like the Heinz logo.

In essence, the campaign says “even AI knows ketchup is Heinz,” and it shows several other prompts the team ran through the AI image generator. All of them included the word “ketchup,” and the results they got all looked much the same.

It is a creative way to bring AI tools into a marketing campaign, and at the same time it proved extremely effective.

Popular AI marketing tools

Once you start building AI into your marketing strategy, you need to find the right tools to use. Take a look at the 6 AI marketing tools below and choose the ones that fit your needs.

ChatGPT: AI chatbot

ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that can give you an answer to anything you type in. It is useful for many activities, such as:

• Brainstorming ideas
• Building content outlines
• Summarizing research
• Optimizing content
• Market analysis

The reality is that ChatGPT can help with almost any request you give it. You can also upload an Excel file to analyze historical data, then use it for predictive analysis, customer behavior forecasts and competitor insight, even without the specialized tools that offer those features.

If you do not use any other AI tool, you should at least have a ChatGPT account.

Pricing: There is a free plan with usage limits. The cheapest paid plan is ChatGPT Go (about 132,000 VND per month in Vietnam); the Plus plan costs more and unlocks stronger models and higher usage limits. Since late September 2026, ChatGPT has started showing ads to Free and Go users in Vietnam.

Jasper: content creation tool

If you need support with producing content, Jasper is a very good fit. The platform has an intuitive workspace that lets you create content at scale, optimize that content for the best possible results, carry out research and develop ideas in depth.

Jasper is built as a content creation tool for marketers, but it also offers AI agents: AI that works fully on its own and helps you get more done in less time.

Pricing: The Pro plan starts at $59 per user per month billed annually ($69 billed monthly), with a 7-day free trial.

Midjourney: image generation tool

Midjourney is an AI-powered image generation platform. It originally ran through a Discord server (which still works), but it now has a web app that makes the experience easier. Users can type in a text description, upload images for reference and combine them with some of Midjourney’s built-in parameters to create images for their marketing activities.

The tool can produce photorealistic images, artistic images, surreal styles and many other kinds of creative work. Since June 2025, Midjourney has had its V1 video model, which turns images into short video clips of about 5 seconds that can be extended.

Pricing: Paid plans start at $8 per month.

Hootsuite: social media content

Hootsuite is a social media management platform, but it also offers a set of free AI tools that help marketers come up with post ideas. They include:

• Caption generator
• Tweet generator
• Video title generator
• Video description generator
• Hashtag generator
• Username generator
• Social media bio (social profile) generator
• Content idea generator
• Blog idea generator

Take advantage of these completely free tools to brainstorm many more ideas for your social media posts. They are also a textbook example of AI marketing in their own right: they give users real value while promoting the Hootsuite brand in a natural way.

Pricing: The AI generator tools are completely free. Hootsuite’s social media management suite starts at $99 per user per month.

Zapier: marketing automation

Zapier is an AI-powered marketing automation platform that makes it easy for marketers to build automated workflows. Zapier works through what it calls “zaps,” which connect your tools to each other to create automated workflows that simply were not possible before.

Examples: automatically adding leads to your CRM, adding new blog posts to your content calendar, or adding new customers to a spreadsheet so you can keep track of them.

These are only a few basic zaps, though. Zapier also supports more advanced workflows that use AI to automate more complex marketing tasks.

Pricing: Free for 100 tasks per month. If you need more, the paid plan costs $19.99 per month.

Tidio: chatbot

Tidio is chatbot software that lets businesses build their own AI chatbot for interacting with customers. Through it, customers can get support, receive product recommendations or book an appointment without ever leaving the chatbot window.

You can train Tidio’s AI assistant, Lyro, on your own business data so that it supports customers automatically, while still handing more complex questions over to your staff whenever that is needed.

Pricing: Based on the number of conversations per month. The Free plan covers up to 50 conversations; the Starter plan starts at $24.17 per month (billed annually) for 100 conversations.

Frequently asked questions about AI marketing

What are some examples of AI marketing today?

Chatbots are one form of AI that has become very common on business websites. Other examples in marketing include ad targeting, dynamic pricing and ChatGPT itself.

How is AI changing marketing?

AI’s biggest impact on marketing is automating repetitive tasks. That gives digital marketers more time to focus on their projects and to develop strategy on a larger scale.

How do you use AI in digital marketing?

Apply AI to the work where it genuinely adds value. Automate repetitive tasks such as reporting, scheduling and customer care. Use AI to speed up content planning and to pull insight out of your data faster. Let AI handle the repetitive work so your team can focus on strategy and creative.

Should you trust AI tools?

In principle, there is nothing to be worried about when you use AI tools. You should still review any work that AI produces, though, so you avoid problems such as plagiarism or inaccurate information.

AI is the future of marketing

AI is now an important part of marketing. You can use these tools to create content for your marketing campaigns, to analyze results and to predict where trends are heading in the future.