For years, content creators have rightly said that AI design tools weren’t capable enough to help with their work. That might be changing now, according to new data from social media management platform Metricool.
Metricool’s survey of over 700 creators and marketers, exclusively shared with CNET, found that 98% of respondents use AI in their work. Some of the most popular tasks where AI is used are strategy design (62%), trend research (61%) and metrics analysis (59%), all of which have increased significantly from 2025. Nearly 40% are using four or more AI tools.
The data signals a wider and deeper adoption of AI across social media professionals’ work.
“People are using it more strategically rather than just bounc[ing] ideas off ChatGPT or Claude,” said Anniston Ward, US marketing manager at Metricool. “They’re able to use it more strategically in a deeper way. … It’s going to be a core skill moving forward, to use AI thoughtfully rather than just at a very fundamental, basic level.”
There’s a kind of two-pronged approach to AI in digital marketing. For daily tasks and repetitive chores, creative AI tools can help automate workflows and customize content, by locality and platform. And there’s a growing opportunity to embed AI across programs for more advanced workflows.
“Good social teams are increasingly building an entire AI stack,” said Matt Navarra, social media expert and author of the Geekout newsletter. Instead of asking ChatGPT for 10 caption options, social media teams can now connect AI tools directly to where their data lives in Google Drive. “That moves AI from being a chatbot into something much closer to an operating layer for the whole social marketing team.”
Digital marketing is a key example of how AI adoption is playing out in the workplace: workers using it for daily chores, while organizations seek out more ingrained workflows, like handing off tasks to AI agents or connecting AI tools directly into existing databases for better insights.
For social media professionals, AI may be beginning to actually get stuff done.
Using AI while avoiding slop
The nuts and bolts of AI in social media work are largely the same as in previous years. The two biggest uses for AI in social media work are for writing copy and captions (86%) and generating content ideas (84%).
But surprisingly, there has been a significant increase in the number of social media professionals using AI for graphic design or image editing, up from 38% in 2025 to 61% now. This may be partly because the actual AI image-editing tools released over the past year have dramatically improved. Creative software companies such as Adobe, Canva and Figma have been integrating AI in more purposeful ways — think less slop, more smaller, customized edits. For example, you can constrain the AI in Adobe and Canva to only produce content that’s aligned with brand guidelines, a big priority for creative teams.
“I think, for a lack of better words, [AI is] becoming better and less AI-slop-esque,” said Ward. “It’s allowing for less friction for designers. They’re able to build in a way that’s a little bit more reflective of their work, instead of a generic generative design.”
That ability to differentiate content from the never-ending stream of content on social media is important. These kinds of repetitive, lower-risk work that can be outsourced to AI frees up workers’ time and avoids mass-producing AI slop.
“The smarter use of AI is often backstage,” Navarra said, referring to behind-the-scenes work such as social listening and data analytics. “Don’t outsource your taste, your judgment or personality, because AI should remove the boring bits of social media work, but not the human bits.”
That’s one of the big risks of using AI, especially for bigger things such as strategy. Even though many social media professionals are integrating AI into their strategic work, it comes with risk. Using AI for strategy can result in a kind of “strategy-flavored autocomplete: polished, plausible, but completely average,” Navarra said.
Operating without rules
But for many digital marketers, there are no guardrails for what they can and cannot use AI for. Only 12% of social media professionals say they have clear AI guidelines; nearly half (45%) say they have no formal restrictions or rules around AI usage, the Metricool survey found.
These guardrails set expectations for what’s allowed — for example, outlawing the creation of entirely AI-generated images and creating checklists for humans to use when reviewing and editing AI content. There’s also a privacy concern. If big agencies work with multiple clients, they’ll need data privacy procedures for those AI-integrated datasets.
Without formal rules or education on the best ways to use AI, it’s up to the individual workers to define what’s right for themselves. And in every case, it’s human judgment that should be prioritized.
“Strategy isn’t just data. It’s about judgment, culture, timing and instinct, and also taking risks — because AI doesn’t often give you the riskier options,” Navarra said. “Knowing when the statistically obvious answer is the wrong one is something that you learn from years of experience rather than asking an AI.”
