Designing the AI-enabled marketing team

Every university marketing director I speak to has an AI story. Usually it starts with a pilot: a licence for a writing assistant, a chatbot on the admissions pages, a few enthusiastic early adopters. Twelve months later, the tools are still there, but the way the team works has barely changed.

The teams getting real value have done something harder. They’ve treated AI as a design question about how work flows through the team, and they’ve been deliberate about it.

Start with the work nobody wants

The quickest wins I’ve seen come from the jobs that eat time without adding much: pulling weekly reports from five platforms, resizing assets for every channel, first drafts of routine copy, tagging and tidying CRM data. Automating that work well frees hours every week, and it builds trust in the technology because the results are easy to check.

At Newcastle we started with reporting. Bringing campaign data into one automated view meant the team stopped spending Monday mornings building spreadsheets and started spending them on what the numbers meant.

Then redesign the roles

Once the routine work is handled, the shape of the team should change. You need fewer people producing and more people deciding: strategists who can brief well, editors who can judge quality, analysts who can ask the right questions of the data. That’s a different skills profile, and it needs investment in training, not just software.

You need fewer people producing and more people deciding.

Build the infrastructure underneath

None of this works on messy data. The institutions moving fastest have invested in the unglamorous foundations: a well-governed CRM, consistent tracking, clear rules on what data AI tools can and can’t touch. It’s the least exciting part of the conversation and the one that decides whether everything else succeeds.

Keep people at the centre

Higher education is a human decision, often the biggest a young person makes. AI should give your team more time for the conversations, stories and creative ideas that persuade people, not replace them. The best AI-enabled teams I know are more human in how they show up, not less.

I’ll be exploring this in depth on Season 2 of Marketing Greats in Higher Education, with leaders who’ve done it well and some who’d do it differently next time.

Jonathan Sabarre FCIM MBA is Principal Consultant at QS Quacquarelli Symonds, a keynote speaker and host of Marketing Greats in Higher Education. Get the weekly email or invite him to speak.