Every few weeks, someone posts that they’ve replaced their entire SEO team with a fully automated AI workflow. Cristiano Winckler doesn’t think that’s ever really true. “That is not possible,” he says. “AI is a tool, but it does need a specialist who knows what it’s doing, who has been doing this for years, to use AI as a tool and do things faster, better, more efficiently, of much higher quality.”
What AI is genuinely good at, in his view, is compressing the grunt work: producing reports, running research, collecting and analyzing data at a speed that would have taken weeks, a few years ago. What it still can’t do is supply judgment. “Knowing what to do with that data, which direction to take, finding the nuances, understanding the workflows, that still requires the specialists,” he says. “AI has no information or no knowledge about the political battles that organizations, specifically corporations, have internally.” Client relationships, discernment, and context are still a human job.
John Wilkes has watched that gap play out inside his own team. Specialists who’ve spent a decade or two in SEO get a different result from AI than people using it at a general level. “When they are using AI, it’s a totally different experience,” he says, “because they know what they’re looking for, they know what they’re trying to find. Whereas if you think, let me go to AI and create some content or whatever, it’s such a general level that you can only see what it’s not doing, or where it’s taking liberties, if you’re a true expert in that field.”
Winckler adds a sharper version of the same warning. AI output can look confident and still be wrong. “AI will hallucinate; AI will try to please humans,” he says. “If you’re an expert, you know that it is trying to deceive you, maybe not on purpose.” Without that expertise somewhere in the loop, a team ends up making decisions based on data no one actually checked.
Someone still needs to own it
If specialists supply the judgment, someone else needs to connect that judgment to the tools and automations that make it useful day to day. Winckler calls this person a champion, an idea that came out of conversations he had with other agency leaders at Brighton SEO. “There was a consensus that you need to find your champions,” he says. “That one individual who understands digital marketing workflows. They don’t need to have deep knowledge of SEO or paid media, but they need to understand how paid media, SEO, CRO, and analytics work together.” The role calls for genuine enthusiasm for AI itself, paired with enough grasp of how an agency runs to translate one into the other.
The difference between teams getting real value from AI and teams just experimenting with it, in Winckler’s experience, comes down to that same clarity. “The ones that are able to utilize AI well have a clear goal and a clear process in mind,” he says. “They are able to transfer that into an AI environment to create workflows, to create systems, to create procedures. That is the difference.”
The difference between teams getting real value from AI and teams just experimenting with it, in Winckler’s experience, comes down to that same clarity. “The ones that are able to utilise AI well have a clear goal and a clear process in mind,” he says. “They are able to transfer that into an AI environment to create workflows, to create systems, to create procedures. That is the difference.”
Keeping the whole team current
Ownership at the top doesn’t remove the need to keep everyone else current, since people sit at very different levels of AI fluency. Somebody Digital runs a standing internal session for exactly that. “We have our famous, or infamous, Friday AI sessions where we share knowledge, where we try to educate our team members with the latest tips, tricks and best practices,” Winckler says. The guidance doesn’t need to be exhaustive to work. A short, clear set of do’s and don’ts, revisited regularly as tools change, is enough to lift how a whole team uses AI.
For a marketing leader deciding how to structure this, Winckler’s steer is simple: Find or hire the person who can bridge workflows and automation, keep your specialists doing what they’re already good at, and build in a regular space to keep the rest of the team’s understanding current.
AI is a powerful tool, but it lacks the critical human elements of judgment, context, and understanding of internal corporate dynamics. It cannot replace the specialized experience needed to navigate complex strategy or client relationships.
AI models can hallucinate and produce incorrect information that sounds confident. Human specialists with deep domain knowledge are required to review output, verify accuracy, and ensure the results align with actual business needs.
An AI champion is someone who acts as a bridge between technical automation and marketing workflows. They don’t need to be developers, but they must understand how various marketing disciplines (like SEO and paid media) interact and how to apply AI effectively to those processes.
The key is having clear goals and defined processes. Teams that succeed are those that translate these objectives into specific AI workflows and systems rather than simply experimenting with the technology in a general way.
Successful teams build regular, dedicated spaces—such as internal training sessions—to share the latest tips, tricks, and best practices. A simple, frequently updated set of do’s and don’ts can effectively keep the entire team current.
