u/Brief-Advertising584

We all know how over the last couple of years, automation has started handling a huge amount of marketing work. At the same time, companies are producing more content and running more campaigns than ever with smaller teams.

Some people think this will eliminate a large number of marketing roles. Others believe it will simply shift marketers toward higher-value work like strategy, positioning, branding, audience research, and creative direction.

Curious where people here stand on this. Do you think automation genuinely reduces the need for marketers long term, or does it mostly change the type of work marketers spend time on?

Remote team activities can get awkward pretty quickly, especially when they feel like another meeting people have to attend.

I’ve been looking for simpler options that people can join without much planning:

• Donut: Pairs coworkers for casual chats. Useful when people rarely speak outside their usual team.
• Polly: Good for quick polls, check-ins, and small team games.
• Trofeo live: Lets coworkers make predictions for tournaments like the World Cup or Wimbledon. It handles the scores and leaderboard automatically.
• Kahoot: Works well for casual quizzes and team trivia.
• Gather: A virtual office where people can move around and join conversations instead of sitting in one big video call.
• Skribbl: A basic drawing and guessing game. Easy to start and does not need much explanation.
• Water Cooler Trivia: Sends recurring trivia quizzes that people can complete in their own time.

The activities that seem to work best are the ones people can join in a few minutes without needing another scheduled call.

What has your remote team tried that people actually enjoyed?

Been experimenting with different AI tools for outreach recently and honestly a lot of them felt way too automated for real conversations.

Some tools save time, but then the messages start sounding so generic that you can immediately tell they were AI-generated. And once everything starts feeling robotic, the whole point of outreach kind of falls apart.

The tools I’ve actually found useful are the ones that help in smaller ways. Things like organizing leads better, speeding up research, helping draft replies faster, summarizing calls, or keeping follow-ups from slipping through the cracks.

Curious what people are genuinely using in their sales workflow that feels practical and actually saves time without making the process feel fake.

I’ve been looking at AI tools that help with the repeat work behind business content and marketing. not just writing posts, but turning research, website updates, content planning, repurposing, and reporting into a cleaner process.

A few tools I found interesting:

1. Jasper: Better suited for brand-safe marketing copy, campaigns, emails, and content teams that need consistency.
2. Writer: More focused on enterprise content workflows, brand governance, and keeping AI writing aligned with company rules.
3. Slate: Seems useful for SEO, web, and content teams trying to automate repeated content ops work across multiple pages.
4. ContentStudio: Good for planning, scheduling, and repurposing content across social channels.
5. Narrato: Helps with content planning, briefs, writing, and managing content workflows in one place.
6. Typeface: More focused on branded marketing content and creative generation for teams.
7. Gumloop: Useful for building AI workflows without writing code, especially for research, data, and marketing ops tasks.
8. Airtable AI: Works well if your content calendar, campaigns, or marketing tasks already live inside Airtable.
9. Relay app: Good for approval-based workflows where AI can help draft or summarize, but humans still review before things go out.

My takeaway is that the best AI business tools are not always the ones that just generate content. The more useful ones help connect the steps around content, research, review, publishing, and reporting.

Anyone here using AI for marketing or content ops inside a business? Which tools actually save time without creating another dashboard to manage?

been thinking about whether an AI workforce can replace part of a VA role for my business. mostly repetitive stuff like email replies, scheduling, lead follow ups, customer questions, CRM notes, and basic admin.

kinda makes sense because a lot of VA work is just keeping things from getting missed. but also not sure if an AI agent or a set of agents is really there yet or if you still have to babysit it so much that it defeats the whole point.

has anyone actually replaced part of a VA role with it? trying to figure out if this is actually useful now or still mostly hype.

For me the most impressive use has been using AI as a thinking partner rather than just a tool.

For example, I use it to stress-test decisions before committing reviewing contracts, policies, or client communications and asking “what could go wrong here?” or “what assumptions am I missing?”

How about y’all?