Half of social media marketers can't imagine doing their jobs without AI -
yet most admit wasting money on it

Date:
Wed, 25 Jun 2025 08:25:57 +0000

Description:
Marketers are increasingly reliant on AI tools, yet most find them ineffective, time-consuming, and costly, with budget waste and performance issues growing rapidly.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Over half of marketers say they cant 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 cant 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 tools , yet 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As trends shift rapidly, marketers often find their content outdated by the time it is published, which may explain why over half of senior marketers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 isnt as sophisticated as you think it is," noted Irina Novoselsky, CEO atHootsuite.

"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 cant harness it, leaving the insights marketers truly need hiding in plain sight." (Image credit: NPowell/Flux)

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
AIs 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 AIs transformative power before, only to confront disappointing results. You might also like These are the best AI website builders around Take a look at our pick of the best internet security suites This is the first 8K 120Hz monitor ever produced - but I don't think the tech market will ever be ready for it



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/pro/half-of-social-media-marketers-cant-imagine-doin g-their-jobs-without-ai-yet-most-admit-wasting-money-on-it


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