Before Ruth Favela, I didn’t know much about the world of weather. It was news to me, for example, that existing satellites only provide a limited amount of weather data, leaving 70% of the world without proper forecasting. 

As AI marketing manager at Tomorrow.io, a weather intelligence company, Ruth is part of a team working to change that. 

Tomorrow.io provides hyperlocal insights and ready-to-deploy dashboards so that global leaders — including JetBlue, the U.S. Air Force and Uber — can make informed decisions about weather-related risks. This mission is increasingly important amid increasing climate volatility for businesses that want to (literally) weather the storms that lie ahead. 

Tomorrow.io is a real-world AI use case in action, working to solve a problem the world hasn’t dealt with until now — but it’s far from Ruth’s first professional AI experience.

An Introduction to AI 

After years of working in marketing, Ruth joined an AI chatbot company in 2021 as a content writer, where she learned about large language models, natural language understanding, machine learning, AI and how it all ties together. 

She also learned about the history of AI and how it’s burned consumers before. “In the early 2000s, people thought AI was this really robust and sophisticated tool,” Ruth says, “when it was really just decision trees and ‘if/then’ statements. And then if it didn’t work, people thought the AI wasn’t good.” 

As the second hire for the marketing team, she got right to work building the company’s content library from scratch. “They had 10 blogs the day I started,” Ruth recalls, “and the day I got laid off, they had over 100 pieces of content on the website.” She’d even started to see some of the content ranking, all with the help of AI-powered tools like Frase.io and Grammarly. 

It was clear to Ruth that using AI helped her accelerate content creation, and she was all in. “Say you’re looking to create skyscraper pillar content to build SEO. I’m gonna use AI so that I don’t have to open 15 tabs, create an outline, get all my links, find the keywords, embed things, optimize, publish, and then revisit. That’s like a day’s worth of work!

“With AI tools, I can do that within an hour or two,” she continues. “It’s not replacing what I can do because I’m not having it actually write for me, but I’m getting that initial part of the process together faster and more efficiently.” 

AI Expertise Will Differentiate Marketing Applicants 

If you’re looking for a new job, you’ve probably seen how many content marketing jobs list AI knowledge as a preferred skill. Ruth says using AI tools effectively will be the next competitive advantage for marketers. 

“Do you know what’s under the hood of ChatGPT? Do you understand how natural language understanding works? The difference between ML and AI, or that one is a subset of the other? I think these things will set people apart,” she says. “You can use ChatGPT without understanding what’s under the hood, but that isn’t going to help you because then you don’t know how it can work elsewhere.” 

Ruth is living proof of this theory’s viability, as she secured her job at Tomorrow.io by presenting an AI tech stack and a repurposing workflow to the hiring manager and saying, “This is what we need to be doing, and this is how I want to do it.” 

Learning how to use AI properly today is like learning how to use search engines back in the 1990s and early 2000s. Getting smarter about search terms and filtering through results helped marketers do our jobs better back then, and getting familiar with AI is no different. 

When you get to an advanced level of knowledge and you know how different settings work, you can accomplish your work much faster. This does lead to burnout concerns, so be careful not to offset your productivity gains with more work! 

Getting Started With AI as a Content Marketer

If you want to evaluate your current marketing stack, here is some advice from Ruth, as well as nine AI tools for content marketing.

Automate Project Management Workflows Wherever Possible

At Tomorrow.io, the team uses Sprout Social, a tool with automated workflows built in for content reviews. Explore your tools, and see where you can deploy similar automations to save time and reduce errors. Maybe it’s automatic lead notifications in Slack or integrations between systems so that information is automatically transferred. Whatever the answer for your company, automating project management workflows is often the best place to start. 

Find an LLM That Works for You

Whether you like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, learn about these tools and how they work. Think about other ways you can apply AI models. List which tasks you spend most of your time on each week and which projects take the longest — then search for AI use cases. 

In content marketing, that’s typically outlining or some of the other “pre” work before you start writing/creating. Maybe you hate writing meta descriptions, and so you lean on LLM for that. Whatever it is, get exploring.

6 AI Offerings to Explore

There are countless AI tools available, but here are some of Ruth’s go-to recommendations:

  • Claude: If you feel jaded by ChatGPT, give Claude a try. There are additional safeguards built into the LLM, and Ruth often finds she often gets better results with the same prompt. 
  • Perplexity AI: Google, but better. You can ask Perplexity a specific question and immediately receive linked stats. There’s also a pro tier that allows you to ask more questions to tailor your search results. 
  • Letterdrop: This is a great outlining tool to create intent-focused content for B2B companies. Letterdrop manages all of your internal links and analyzes competitor sites to identify content gaps.
    • Alternatives: SEOWind, Frase, Surfer SEO 
  • Descript: Upload a video and get a transcript you can edit, add chapters to, and create clips from. You can also ask Descript to write social posts based on your transcript (as with most AI tools, you’ll need to edit before you post to add a human touch and check for flow). 
  • Goldcast Content Lab: If virtual events are part of your strategy, Content Lab helps you automatically turn your event recordings into repurposed content you can share on different channels. [Editor’s note: We profiled Goldcast’s events strategy in 2022.]
  • Grammarly: If you don’t have an editor (or even if you do), download Grammarly. Don’t accept all of its edits at once, but use it to catch some of the big stuff you might miss on your own. 

Additionally, Ruth recommends The Artificial Intelligence Show podcast and signing up for AI newsletters that interest you. 

“Don’t sign up for all of them because they tend to have the same information, but find one you want to follow and then also follow them on Twitter,” Ruth says. “Twitter is where all of the AI news is.”