What’s AI’s role on your content team?

AI hasn’t replaced any role on a content team, but it has changed what nearly every role — strategy, creation, optimization, and governance — needs to do well.

A client asked me last week: “How many people do we actually need on our content team?”

Naturally, I got curious. Not about headcount. But about the question hiding underneath it: What does everyone on a content team need to be good at now that AI is part of the job?

I thought about the Cincy AI for Humans monthly meetups I attend. Each agenda allows time for attendees to stand up and pitch a position they are hiring for or to pitch themselves if they are open to work.

It’s never, “I’m looking for someone who can use Claude Code.” Or, “Hire me. I can use Gemini and Copilot.” It’s always about the role, the people and results.

AI literacy, competency and fluency

You might introduce these concepts:

Literacy: “I understand AI.”
Competency: “I can use AI effectively.”
Fluency: “I instinctively know how to combine AI with my own expertise to produce better outcomes.”

The first is arguably non-negotiable. The second is becoming a requirement of many positions. The third is a point of differentiation.

WG Content is fully remote, and AI already touches nearly every stage of how we work: early research, first drafts, even how we structure content so it holds up in AI-powered search. And here’s what I keep coming back to. AI hasn’t replaced a single role on our team. It’s changed what almost every role needs to do well.

How AI is changing content roles

Strategy

AI can model options in seconds, but someone still has to decide which of those options serves your audience and your goals. That judgment call isn’t going anywhere.

Marketing strategy. Business strategy. The best of these strategies capture and analyze data. The AI-fluent understand that given this context, AI presents higher-quality options. It even offers an unprompted opinion. Yesterday ChatGPT told me, “Option A is my favorite. It naturally leads into your four capabilities.” But the best strategists don’t run with that. They kick the tires for the same reason they don’t blindly accept the advice of a co-worker: because the strategist ultimately owns the direction and the outcomes.

AI-fluent strategists also use AI to push past “this is how we’ve always done it.” They invoke personas to pressure-test concepts upfront or when reviewing content on the backend. One of my favorite approaches is to ask AI to simulate a conversation. For example, I asked AI to simulate a conversation between a marketing director and VP of marketing who are reviewing our proposal and website. It shed light on what’s important to each role and what they see!  

Content creation

AI can draft fast, but it still needs a person to add the context, empathy and brand voice that make content sound like it came from your organization and not a chatbot trained on everyone’s organization.

Again and again, I see the analogy of AI to an intern. I read diatribes about AI slop. The truth is that AI generates decent drafts. So what’s missing? Instinct. Taste. Experience. The best creators using AI have an idea going in. At least thoughts. They know what good looks like and they push for it. They know when to push against “best practices” and when not to. They understand how all the preferences laid out in a brand guide come together to consistently present a specific company with a specific voice.

While AI sees a lot — that’s an understatement — it misses human interactions. Conversations. Reactions. It doesn’t feel the words on the page. That’s what a professional writer brings. That’s what anyone using AI for content creation needs to harness.  

Optimization

Ranking well used to be the finish line. Now content also has to be clear and well-sourced enough for AI systems to understand it and trust it, which is a newer skill than most of us have had time to master.

SEO, AEO, GEO — this is the tip of the acronym iceberg for optimization. AI-fluent content strategists frankly don’t care. They see the bottom line — AI and search can’t be uncoupled. Structure and narrative can’t be either. Today’s content strategists look at websites as a whole, not page to page. They collaborate with social media strategists, PR and internal communications because AI takes signals from all these sources at once.

Like marketing strategists, content strategists work with AI for analysis that exercises the same skills.

Governance

Then there’s governance, the one I think about most. As AI speeds up how fast content gets made, someone has to own the guardrails: what AI is allowed to touch, when a human has to review it, how facts get verified before being published instead of after. In healthcare, that review step was never optional. AI just raises the stakes on skipping it.

With or without a mandate from the organization at large, content teams should exercise governance. At WG, we formed an AI Council to consider these questions and make recommendations to leadership. Leadership sets the standard. Every content team member is then responsible for building workflows that support the standard.   

None of that means your team needs more people. It means whoever’s already on it needs to know which of those four jobs they’re covering, and where AI genuinely makes them better at it instead of just faster.

Frankly, the teams I see struggling right now aren’t behind on AI tools. They’re behind on giving AI a job description.

Stay curious about what AI can do. Stay even clearer about what only your team can.

Looking to supplement your content team?

If you’re trying to grow your content team’s capacity, WG Content is ready to help. Contact us to learn more.

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