Effective AI implementation requires effective AI marketing training. We break down what that training looks like, the benefits it brings, the challenges you should be aware of, and how we’ve approached it here at AgileSherpas. We also answer some common questions and share actionable next steps you can take to begin your organization’s AI marketing training journey.
AI implementation can be absolutely transformative for marketing teams, unlocking better data analysis, content creation, operations, strategic planning, and more. It’s no wonder nearly every marketing leader out there is at least thinking about how they can integrate AI into their teams’ workflows.
But the question usually comes down to how… Just telling marketers to start using AI can easily create slapdash and ineffective uses that keep compliance teams up at night. To effectively unlock everything AI has to offer in marketing you need training to help you develop an experimental mindset ready to adapt at the speed of AI innovation itself.
Understanding AI Marketing Training
Considering all the ways AI is used in marketing, how can you possibly provide training that will equip them for all these uses? The simple answer is that you don’t. Instead, you can think of AI marketing training as two broken up into two different approaches.
The first is training designed to build a culture of testing and experimentation that’s ready to continuously improve how AI is used. This is the most foundational type of AI marketing training, as it equips marketers to apply AI tools to just about any situation. Put another way, it’s a “teach them how to think instead of what to think” kind of approach.
But while training around how to test and improve how AI is used within marketing is an ideal foundation for long-term success, it’s not the only kind of AI marketing training out there. People can also be trained to use one or more AI tools to accomplish specific marketing tasks like building personas, analyzing customer sentiment, or assisting in content production.
Regardless of the approach you take, AI training is vital because these tools are complex, not always intuitive, and often present tricky compliance issues. Ensuring marketers are comfortable using AI tools and understand how they should be used is essential.
Key Components of Effective AI Marketing Training Programs
Whether you’re developing AI marketing training in-house or looking for an external partner, what elements should you look for?
Focused on the Right Goals
With more than 6 new AI tools releasing on the average day this year, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and distracted wondering where to even focus. Avoiding that problem begins with looking at your organization’s strategic goals. Instead of asking “how can we use AI to improve” ask how you can use AI to move the needle on your most priorities instead.
For example, let’s say one of your organization’s yearly KPIs is improving your customer retention rates. Based on that, you might set up experiments around using AI to improve personalization. Or you might use it to analyze customer communication to better understand what’s driving their decisions.
Practical & Hands-on
Simply watching some online videos about how to use AI isn’t going to be sufficient for real implementation. To maximize the effectiveness of AI marketing training, it needs to balance that kind of structured learning with learning from others and, most crucially, applying those learnings. A handy way to think about this balance is by referencing the 70-20-10 model.
This is particularly important with AI, where being told to use a particular tool should be just the start. Marketers will need to practice writing prompts, learn what various tools are good at, and test the limits of their capabilities to really get the most out of AI in their work.
Ongoing
This doesn’t mean you’ll need to have a structured AI marketing training program once a quarter. But the pace at which AI marketing features and tools are being released means the space is changing on literally a daily basis. So to remain effective, marketers need to embrace continuous learning.
In practice, this means regularly setting aside time to look at new tools and capabilities, develop and implement tests, and incorporate those learnings. This could happen at the beginning of each sprint, monthly, or quarterly. What matters most is that you build a culture that understands and embraces the continuous improvement and change that AI is bringing to marketing. This is the only way to ensure your team remains effective at using the technology as it evolves.
Before moving on to learn the benefits of AI training, why don't you take a second to get the most recent State of Agile marketing report?
Benefits of AI Training for Marketing Teams
If AI marketing training requires strategic thinking, hands-on practical training, and ongoing investment, what makes it all worth it? First, it’s worth pointing out that the benefits of AI training are the benefits of AI for marketers. Skipping training means increasing the risk of compliance issues, inconsistent and slow implementation,
So if you do invest in AI training for marketers, what benefits can you expect?
Better Strategic Planning
Because strategic planning involves synthesizing vast amounts of information like what has worked, what hasn’t worked, capacity, market changes, etc. AI’s ability to analyze data at scale is tremendously useful.
Here at AgileSherpas, this can mean asking the built-in AI assistant for our project management tool Asana questions like “what types of tasks created bottlenecks last year,” or “which team members were the most and least likely to complete their tasks last year” to get an idea about capacity.
You might also feed a basic AI tool like ChatGPT a small mountain of text from your customers and ask about their most common complaints. This is an area where you can absolutely get creative, but it’s clear that AI tools enable marketers to improve their strategic planning by equipping themselves with more and better quality information. This is particularly true for larger organizations with more information to sift through.
Improved Marketing Operations
We’ve long argued that marketing operations is far more crucial to success than most realize. These are the processes that enable every single thing marketing does to happen. Fortunately, this is also another area where AI can create significant improvements.
Firstly, AI can help operations identify where processes are failing. Taking the bottleneck prompt we mentioned under the strategic planning section, you can ask AI tools to help you understand where problems are arising. AI can also help automate more processes like customer support (through chatbots), sentiment analysis (through language analysis tools), and data analysis. Like with strategic planning, the ability of these benefits to scale means they have even greater impact on larger organizations.
Scaled Personalization
Personalizing content for specific personas or even specific customers is a time-consuming process. But there’s also no denying that personalization in marketing is more important than ever. Fortunately, AI tools offer ways to scale personalization through things like email generation, chatbots, or even personalized offers. Just be sure to test such tools and check their work to ensure you aren’t getting errors that may hurt your relationships with customers.
Faster & Better Content Production
While simply using AI tools to generate articles, emails, or other texts and then hitting publish is a bad idea, AI can absolutely help in content production. One of our favorite techniques here at AgileSherpas is asking AI bots to consider problems from the perspectives of specific personas. Here, instead of writing for us, the AI tools are helping us consider new perspectives and think about how people might react to ways of framing problems.
Of course, you can also use AI to quickly generate a kind of rough draft that can help you overcome the dreaded “staring at a blank page” phase if that’s your challenge. In other cases, you can experiment with feeding content you’ve written into tools and asking it to rewrite that content from a different perspective or with a different tone. In other words, it’s best to look at AI as a kind of creative tool for content production rather than something that can fully take the process over.
More Creativity
This is one of the benefits of AI in marketing that just doesn’t get talked about enough. By saving time and increasing individual capabilities, marketers can devote more resources to the kind of creative thinking that really moves the needle.
Challenges of Implementing AI without Training
Resistance to Change
Plenty of marketers are afraid of AI and fearful of its use. This is one reason why simply telling a marketing team to begin using it without any training can produce bad outcomes. Some may resent the order and resist using AI tools. By contrast, AI marketing training can help them understand how and why using AI can actually augment their capabilities as marketers.
Skill Gaps
If you decide to simply issue a mandate that marketers begin incorporating AI into their work, it’s likely there are some unseen skill gaps that will cause issues. Marketers who don’t feel comfortable using AI, don’t know how to write prompts for AI tools, or simply struggle to troubleshoot when things go wrong will struggle in such circumstances. AI marketing training offers an opportunity to identify and address those skill gaps.
Compliance Issues
Trying to implement AI in your marketing without providing training and guidance around compliance issues can lead to serious legal risks. Everything from inputting sensitive information into an AI tool to publishing AI generated content that may be under copyright can easily happen when marketers are not aware of what guidelines they should follow.
Unclear ROI
Even if marketers do begin using AI, without giving some structure to that use it can be difficult to understand its ROI. For example, your marketers begin using a tool to help generate content production ideas. How will you know whether that’s saving time in the process? What about its impact on quality? The key to understanding this information is structuring proper experiments. AI marketing training can help teach marketers how to do that so the ROI of the various AI tools they may try using will be much clearer.
AgileSherpas’ Approach to AI Marketing Training
Most of what we know and believe about AI marketing training comes from our experience doing it here at AgileSherpas. So what did we do?
Luckily, we started with an Agile culture that embraces experimentation. That foundation was absolutely crucial for everything that followed. Our AI journey began with a kind of strategic announcement for our CEO that we needed to start experimenting and using AI in our work. This wasn’t a command, but letting us know that we were being encouraged to start experimenting on our own (fortunately we don’t have as many compliance challenges as many other businesses). It also communicated how and why AI was going to help with certain strategic priorities we have as a business, so everyone understood the logic behind this shift.
Next, a few key members of our internal team decided to take the lead and really dive deep into AI experimentation. As they did this, they regularly shared their learnings with everyone else. So even team members who weren’t using AI much yet were beginning to hear about the process. Once those team members felt they had learned enough they began to host internal workshops to share their knowledge and help others use the proven tools and strategies they had developed.
From this point, most people in our organization were feeling comfortable using AI tools and knew who to ask if they had any questions. Discussions in Slack channels and in some meetings further shared what people were learning and what tools they were discovering. That’s about where we are as of the beginning of Q2 2025, but it feels like the pinwheel of continuous improvement around AI has started to turn and we’re confident we’re moving in the right direction.
AI Marketing Training FAQs
How to become an AI marketing specialist?
Because there’s no certification or official way to become an “AI marketing specialist,” the title really conveys your mindset and capabilities. In other words, you can become an AI marketing specialist only by embracing AI in your marketing. This means experimenting with tools, constantly learning about what others are doing, and generally becoming comfortable with testing and using AI in your everyday work.
What is an AI marketing course?
AI marketing courses can vary based on who is providing it, but in general they focus on training marketers to incorporate AI tools into their work. That might mean focusing on a specific area like operations or more general training around how AI tools work, how to evaluate and test them, etc. If you’re looking for AI marketing courses, consider your existing knowledge base and what new skills you’re hoping to develop.
How can AI be used in marketing?
AI has a huge variety of uses in marketing from analyzing digital ad data to optimize performance to helping writers develop content ideas. In fact, most marketers today use AI in one way or another and the ability to effectively integrate it into their work is fast becoming a marker of success.
Can a non IT person learn AI?
Fortunately, you don’t need an IT background or any particular technical skills to learn how to use AI tools. Most are quite user friendly and the biggest challenges you may encounter is troubleshooting or identifying what is causing problems. Most such challenges can be solved or understood through trial and error. So the key is really to simply embrace the use of AI and experiment with it regularly.
Your AI Marketing Training Next Step
It’s important to remember that today, the ability to implement AI in your marketing represents a crucial competitive advantage. With the AI tools available constantly innovating, marketers need to keep pace with this change and AI marketing training helps them do just that.
To help marketers hone their AI skills, AgileSherpas is currently developing courses and workshops designed for marketers at various levels of AI proficiency. If you’d like a consultation about these programs or even developing a custom training program tailored to your organization’s needs, contact us.
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