AI and Automation: Building Smarter Marketing Systems

Running a lean marketing team across a national portfolio means every hour has to count. When I looked at where our team was spending time, a lot of it was on work that did not need a human: moving data between tools, reformatting content for different markets, starting every article from a blank page.

I started with Zapier, connecting the tools our teams already use every day. Automating data flows between forms, spreadsheets, and Asana meant our on-site leasing teams could spend less time on manual data entry and more time closing leases. Small automations, real time savings.

From there I moved into custom GPTs, building systems trained on our specific workflows. Anything rinse and repeatable in our style became a candidate: content production using the They Ask You Answer framework, award submission storytelling, press releases. Instead of starting from scratch every time, our team could produce market-specific content faster and more consistently across brands while maintaining the same voice and quality.

As the technology kept evolving, so did what I could build with it. I started working with Claude to tackle more complex problems: building agents that could handle multi-step processes, speeding up work that was still manual not because it had to be but because no one had built the process to replace it yet. Every time the tools get better, the ceiling for what a lean team can do gets higher.

By pairing AI tools with our intern-powered content team, I cut the intern headcount needed to power our content operation in half while maintaining output quality and actually improving consistency. I also led company-wide AI enablement training at LV Collective, helping teams across the organization find their own use cases.

I am still building. The through line is the same in everything: find where the manual work is, build something smarter, and free the team up to do the work that actually requires a human.