For most marketers, AI has leveled the playing field for efficiency. Anyone — with the right knowledge and tools — can streamline content creation workflows to get pieces published faster.
But when everyone can access the same level of efficiency, what’s left to differentiate you from your most likely competitors? It turns out that AI can help with that, too.
Here are several creative and strategic ways to leverage AI for a competitive edge.
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What Does ‘Differentiation’ Entail?
Differentiation in the age of AI isn’t just about adopting the newest tools, but about how you apply, frame and communicate your usage of them. Two companies might use the same AI platform, yet one bears a badge of innovation while the other struggles to keep up.
The difference often lies in approach: How openly a brand talks about its AI use, how thoughtfully it integrates AI into customer experiences and how creatively it applies automation without losing the human touch. Some brands differentiate through design thinking, using AI to reimagine customer journeys; others stand out through ethics and transparency, positioning AI as a partner, not a starting player.
That said, there are a few ways I choose to interpret “using AI to differentiate yourself” in this blog:
- How you can make use of AI tools to gain an edge.
- How you communicate your AI use with others, mostly your audience.
- Where and how you choose to apply (or not apply) AI.
1. Generate “White Space” Maps
People use AI to brainstorm content all the time, prompting chatbots for blog ideas and headlines. But going straight for a “What should I write?” style prompt usually results in concepts that others have already penned.
Instead, use AI to audit your industry’s content saturation. Instead of asking it “What should I write about?” try: “What are my competitors not writing about?” Have it analyze tens or even hundreds of competitor articles, videos or social posts to cluster them by theme and help you visualize where the gaps are.
From there, pluck your topics from that unfed idea zone and fill the gaps with quality content.
2. Streamline SME Info Gathering
One of your business’s greatest assets is its people; its experts. They hold a wealth of information and experience in your industry, with unique perspectives and innovative ideas that no one else can access — much less use to inform their content.
Unfortunately, gathering internal SME can be time-consuming, especially when your project plate is already full. What if AI could interview your SMEs for you, while you get a head start brainstorming your next asset or working out what your competition isn’t writing about?
Tools like contentmarketing.ai offer built-in SME workflows that make interviewing your experts easy. It’ll ask the questions, and deliver the answers to you.
If you’ve got another tool already integrated into your martech stack that doesn’t have dedicated SME functionality, try pasting your target expert’s bio into your AI engine (to give it context on their role and experience), describing your project and your goal, and have it come up with questions that you can take into an interview yourself. Afterward, feed it the transcript from that call to help you flesh out blog ideas or a full draft informed by your SME’s unique insight.
Tip: AI-generated transcripts can be messy. For the best results, I recommend pulling out the most important bits of the conversation and cleaning those snippets up manually to remove the “umms” and “aahs” before handing them over to your AI of choice.
3. Have It Do SEO For You
SEO is still important for organic visibility, but it takes time and energy to manually optimize blogs — stamina that you could instead spend on devising new ways to stand out.
Some AI tools can suggest optimal SEO updates for existing blogs, or even create them from scratch based on your completed keyword research. When you don’t have to spend as much time worrying about terms and the perfect places to put them in an article, you can spend more time creating outstanding net-new content that pulls people to read it over competing collateral.
4. Showcase How You Use AI Ethically
While millions of people are leveraging AI for efficiency gains, few are telling anyone about how they’re using it — or that they’re using it at all.
There’s a high chance your competitors have an AI tool in their kit in one form or another — but they’re customers may not have a clue. Eventually, that chips away at trust. Nearly two-thirds (62%) of customers say they would trust brands more if they were transparent about AI use, according to a global survey by RWS research. That’s a lot of trust left on the table, ready to snatch up by simply being honest.
5. Strategically Choose When Not To Use AI
Is suggesting not to use AI to set yourself apart from your competition counterintuitive to this blog title? Maybe. AI adoption inches further toward falling off the charts every day. Your competitors are probably using it. You’re probably using it. And if it’s providing great ROI or productivity gains without compromising your guiding ethical principles, I’d never tell you to stop.
While global trust in AI systems is increasing, the figure still falls below half (46%). While you’re integrating AI systems into your workflows, make it a point to forgo them in areas where it’s unnecessary or you feel like you could do fine (or even excel) without them — and tell your audience about it.
Here are a couple of example statements to give you an idea of what I mean:
“We like AI for the heavy lifting, not the handshakes. At Acme, our chatbots can sort data, but they’ll never speak for us. When you talk to us via phone, email or chat, you talk to real people who understand nuance and the true context of your question.”
Or:
“We believe technology should serve privacy, not invade it. That’s why at Acme Health, we limit our AI use strictly to anonymized analytics and never use it in patient communication or diagnoses.”
While you won’t be able to know about all the internal AI tools your competitors use, check in on the customer-facing tools and try to glean sentiment from their audience. Do they appreciate where AI is applied? If yes, maybe look into that application for yourself or how you can do it differently or better. Are they annoyed with it? Make it a selling point that you won’t integrate AI in the same way.
Final Thoughts
As AI adoption continues to grow, it’s important for brands to intentionally shift away from merely collecting new tools to focusing on how they choose to apply them to their workflows. The businesses that stand out will be those that aren’t just picky about their AI assistants and apply them wisely, but also those who use them creatively to gain a competitive advantage.
