- Over half of marketers say they can’t do their jobs without AI, despite poor results
- Budgets for AI keep rising, even though 81% of leaders say it’s being wasted
- Marketers are stuck manually fixing AI output for days every week
Social media professionals have grown increasingly dependent on artificial intelligence, with new research finding more than half saying they now can’t imagine performing their roles without it.
A survey from Hootsuite claims this growing reliance is not matched by results despite heavy investments in AI technologies.
The firm’s research reveals 88% of senior marketing leaders are encouraging their teams to use AI toolsyet 81% admit budgets are being wasted on tools not fit for purpose.
Manual work persists despite automation promises
Delving deeper, Hootsuite found many marketers find themselves trapped in a time-consuming cycle of manual labor and subpar outcomes, revealing a deep disconnect between expectations and the actual utility of generative AI tools in marketing.
A significant proportion of social media managers still spend up to three full working days each week verifying AI-generated content and manually gathering insights from online platforms.
This lag not only drains staff time but also affects campaign performance.
As trends shift rapidly, marketers often find their content outdated by the time it is published, which may explain why over half of senior marketers feel their campaigns consistently underperform.
The financial implications are just as troubling. Budgets for AI tools continue to rise, yet for some, the wasted investment exceeds 20% of their entire marketing budget.
“This should be a wake up call to all marketers: traditional AI isn’t as sophisticated as you think it is,” noted Irina Novoselsky, CEO at Hootsuite.
“With five billion people spending up to five hours a day online, social is one of the richest sources of real-time data sources available and yet, traditional AI tools still can’t harness it, leaving the insights marketers truly need hiding in plain sight.”
With rising pressure from executive leadership to justify every expense, marketers are finding it increasingly difficult to defend investments in AI tools that fail to deliver tangible returns.
A critical weakness in current generative AI systems lies in their reliance on outdated datasets.
These tools often fail to capture the dynamic nature of real-time audience behavior, meaning that their insights may be out of sync with the present moment.
While 64% of senior leaders believe their AI tools offer real-time insights, only 39% of social media managers agree, a clear signal that confidence in AI’s real-world performance is uneven across organizational levels.
In response to these challenges, Hootsuite has introduced OwlyGPT, a generative AI assistant trained on live social data.
The company says, this tool delivers up-to-the-minute insights tailored to brand voice and cultural context.
Considering the issues with AI static data, this move appears promising, but it’s good to approach it with some skepticism. After all, businesses have been led to believe in AI’s transformative power before, only to confront disappointing results.