In this episode of Product Momentum, content strategist Brian Piper joins Dan Sharp and guest co-host Tim Snedden to describe the power of AI in content strategy—revealing how these tools act as creative partners, not just digital workhorses. What’s at stake isn’t just automation or efficiency, but a fundamental shift in how product managers, writers, and organizations approach content creation, measurement, and change management.

Here’s what we talked about:

Supporting intentional, data-driven content

Brian opens with a simple but powerful truth: a great content strategy doesn’t depend on luck or volume. Successful teams align their efforts with business goals and audience needs—avoiding wasted cycles and maximizing their return on effort.

“No more random acts of content,” he stated. “If every piece of content you create does not have a specific end goal or a specific audience you’re trying to connect with, you’re wasting your time…. Real content strategy is much more intentional, much more data inspired, and much more focused on helping you reach specific goals.”

Change management: the human side of AI

Adopting AI isn’t just about adding a new tool to your tech stack. Those of us trying to figure out how best to integrate AI into our workflows need to understand that it’s not just another technology adoption project.

“This is really change management,” Brian adds, underscoring the need for a thoughtful process – one that brings everyone along for the ride and seeks buy-in from all the right people, including ICs, leadership, IT, and legal.

The data behind great decisions

Throughout the conversation, Brian returns to the theme of responsible data practice. Safeguarding personal information is paramount, but public and low-risk data – e.g., content-related performance metrics – can unlock valuable insights. AI excels at finding hidden gaps and guiding content teams to lead audiences deeper into the brand journey.

“Now we can feed that information into AI,” Brian continues. “And it can look through all of those keywords, finding correlations, anomalies, and clusters of content topics where we already have search dominance. AI is great at gap analysis, as well. Humans are great at seeing what’s in front of us, but not so great at seeing what’s missing.

The Product Momentum team travels to Cleveland Sept. 9-10, where we will be recording in-person episodes with John Cutler, Michelle Parsons, Shensi Ding, Sahil Jain, and Axel Sooriah. Be sure to stop by the The Podcast Zone to say hi! Special thanks to our friends at Mind the Product and INDUSTRY for their hospitality!

Tim Snedden is a content strategist at ITX who’s responsible for delivering crystal-clear information to users right when they need it. He spoke at the 2024 Flower City AI conference on the efficacy of large language models for accelerating content creation and leads AI initiatives at ITX.

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