How to Design an AI-Enabled University Marketing Team

Show notes

Many marketing teams are a year into an AI pilot with little changed. I explain why this is a design question, where to start, and why the best AI-enabled teams end up more human.

• Start with the work nobody wants, such as reporting, resizing assets and CRM tidying.
• Shift the team towards strategists, editors and analysts: fewer producing, more deciding.
• Build foundations first: governed CRM, consistent tracking and clear data rules.

Read the article: Designing the AI-enabled marketing team

Full transcript

Hello, and welcome to Marketing Greats in Higher Education. I'm Jonathan Sabarre, your host, and this is where we explore the ideas shaping how universities are seen, chosen and trusted around the world. Everything I share on this show is my own personal view.

Every university marketing director I speak to has an AI story. It starts with a pilot: a licence for a writing assistant, a chatbot on the admissions pages, a handful of enthusiastic early adopters. Then twelve months go by. The tools are still there, the licences are still being paid for, but the way the team works has barely changed. Buying the tools, it turns out, is the easy part!

The teams getting real value have done something harder. They've treated AI as a design question: how work flows through the team from first brief to final delivery, with every step deliberate. It's less like buying a new appliance and more like redesigning the kitchen. That means looking honestly at where the hours go each week, and asking which of them really need a person.

My advice is always to start with the work nobody wants. The quickest wins come from jobs that eat time without adding much: pulling weekly reports from five platforms, resizing assets for every channel, first drafts of routine copy, tidying CRM data. Automate that well and you free up hours every week. You also build trust in the technology, because the results are easy to check. People can see it working.

At Newcastle, we started with reporting. Bringing our campaign data into one automated view meant the team stopped spending Monday mornings building spreadsheets, and started spending them on what the numbers meant. A small change, but it shifted the whole week from gathering information to making decisions with it. The meetings got better too, because everyone arrived having seen the same picture.

Once the routine work is handled, the shape of the team should change. You need fewer people producing, and more people deciding. That means strategists who brief well, editors who judge quality, and analysts who ask the right questions of the data. It's a different skills profile, and it needs investment in training as well as software. The training budget is where you find out whether a leadership team is serious about AI, or simply curious.

None of this works on messy data. The institutions moving fastest have invested in unglamorous foundations: a well-governed CRM, consistent tracking, and clear rules about what data AI tools can and can't touch. Those rules protect the trust of students and applicants too, and in our sector, trust is everything. A brilliant tool on top of a chaotic database will simply produce chaos faster.

I think of it like building a house. Nobody admires the foundations when visitors arrive. But when they're wrong, every room above starts to crack. Governance, data quality and clear rules are your foundations. Get them right first, and the clever tools become easier to adopt, because people trust what's underneath. Skip them, and you'll spend the next year patching cracks instead of building anything new.

Then there's the part that matters most. Higher education is a deeply 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. It shouldn't replace them. The best AI-enabled teams I know are more human, not less. Think of the applicant who rings with a worry the night before a deadline. That call deserves a person with the time to listen.

I'll be exploring all of this in depth throughout the season, with leaders who've done it well, and some who'd do it differently next time. So if you're twelve months into a pilot and wondering why so little has changed, take heart. The tools were never the hard part. Redesign the work, invest in your people, and technology gives you something precious back: the time to do the human things brilliantly!

Thank you for spending this time with me. If this episode sparked something for you, hit subscribe, so you never miss the next one. And our full season, with guests from leading universities around the world, is coming very soon. Head to Jonathan Sabarre dot com and sign up, so you're the first to know when it launches. Until next time, keep building something great.