More than half of marketers say they can’t use AI to work despite insufficient results.
Social media experts have grown increasingly reliant on artificial intelligence, and new research says more than half can imagine that they can’t perform their role without it.
A Hootsuite study argues that despite heavy investments in AI technology, this growth of dependency does not coincide with the outcome.
The company’s survey revealed that 88% of senior marketing leaders encourage their teams to use AI tools, while 81% admit that their budgets are wasted with unsuitable tools.
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Despite the promise of automation, manual work continues
Digging deeper, Hootsuite finds many marketers trapped in a time-consuming cycle of manual labor and degraded results, revealing a deep disconnect between the actual usefulness of generator AI tools in marketing.
A significant percentage of social media managers spend up to three business days each week, verifying AI-generated content and collecting insights manually from online platforms.
This delay not only drains staff time, but also affects campaign performance.
As trends change rapidly, marketers often have their content becoming obsolete by the time they are published.
The economic impact is just as troubling. While AI tools budgets continue to grow, for some, wasteful investments are over 20% of the total marketing budget.
“This should be a wake-up call for every marketer. Traditional AI isn’t as sophisticated as you think,” says Irina Novoselsky, CEO of Hootsuite.
“With 5 billion people spend up to five hours online, social is one of the richest sources of real-time data sources available, but traditional AI tools can’t take advantage of it.
With increasing pressure from executive leadership to justify all costs, it is becoming increasingly difficult for marketers to defend investments in AI tools that cannot provide tangible returns.
A significant weakness of current generation AI systems is their reliance on outdated datasets.
These tools often fail to capture the dynamic nature of real-time audience behavior. In other words, their insights may not be in sync with the present moment.
While 64% of senior leaders believe that AI tools provide real-time insights, only 39% of social media managers agree, this is a clear signal that trust in AI’s actual performance is heterogeneous across organizational levels.
To address these challenges, Hootsuite has introduced Owlygpt, a generator AI assistant trained in live social data.
According to the company, the tool offers up-to-date insights tailored to the brand’s voice and cultural context.
Considering the issue of static data in AI, this move looks promising, but it’s a good thing to approach it skeptical. After all, companies have been led previously to believe in the transformational power of AI, but only face disappointing consequences.
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