- Over half of marketers say they can’t do their jobs without AI despite poor results
- Budgets to AI continues to rise even though 81% of leaders say it is wasting
- Marketing people are stuck manually to fix AI -Onde output in days each week
Professionals on social media have become increasingly dependent on artificial intelligence, where new research finds more than half of saying that they now cannot imagine performing their roles without it.
A study by Hootsuite claims that this growing addiction is not matched by results despite heavy investments in AI technologies.
The company’s research reveals that 88% of senior market leaders are calling on their teams to use AI tools, yet 81% are wasted, where budgets are wasted on tools not suitable for the purpose.
Manual work persists despite automation promises
Diving of deeper, Hootsuite found that many marketers found themselves trapped in a time-consuming cycle of manual labor and subpar results, which revealed a deep interruption between expectations and the actual usability of generative AI tools in marketing.
A significant part of social media managers still spend up to three full working days each week to verify AI-generated content and manually collect insight from online platforms.
This delay not only drains staffing time, but also affects campaign performance.
When trends quickly change, marketers often find their content outdated at the time it is published, which may explain why over half of senior marketers feel that their campaigns are consistently underpinning.
The financial consequences are just as worrying. Budgets for AI tools continue to rise, but for some, the wasted investment exceeds 20% of their entire marketing budget.
“This should be a waking call to all marketers: Traditional AI is not as sophisticated as you think it is,” noted Irina Novoselsky, CEO of Hootsuite.
“With five billion people who spend up to five hours a day online, social is one of the richest sources of available real-time data sources, and yet traditional AI tools still can’t use it, leaving the insights that marketers really need to hide in the sight.”
With increasing pressure from executing management to justify all expenses, marketers find it increasingly difficult to defend investments in AI tools that do not deliver concrete returns.
A critical weakness in the current generative AI systems lies in their dependence on outdated data sets.
These tools are often capturing the dynamic nature of real -time audience behavior, which means their insight can be out of sync with the present moment.
While 64% of senior leaders believe their AI tools offer insight into real time, only 39% of social media managers agree, a clear signal that trust in AIS real performance is uneven across organizational levels.
In response to these challenges, Hootsuite has introduced Owunelight, a generative AI assistant trained in live social data.
The company says this tool delivers up-to-the-minute insight tailored to brand voice and cultural context.
Given the problems of AI -Static data, this step seems promising, but it is good to approach it with some skepticism. After all, companies have been led to believe in AIS transformative power before, only to confront disappointing results.
