AI workflow automation for faster, smarter business operations

Almost every organization in the world has felt the pull of automation one way or another. In fact, research shows that up to 80% of companies now view “the end-to-end automation of as many business processes as possible” as their primary tech goal. 

But, when it comes to digital content marketing, most successful brands understand that the trend away from manual effort isn’t just about being able to produce more content, but more good content. 

That means, as brands integrate automated content tools into their workflows, they need to be able to retain close control of their voices and the fine detail of their business processes, and continue to tailor their content to the needs and preferences of their audiences — even as the need for new blogs, product pages, and marketing campaigns grows. 

To rise to that challenge, many brands are embracing the transformative power of artificial intelligence (AI) — which promises to streamline content operations, reduce manual effort, and unchain skilled content teams from repetitive tasks. The use of AI-powered solutions has grown dramatically in the past few years: in 2017 around 20% of global businesses had integrated AI into at least one of their business processes, but in 2024 that number had risen to 78%. The jump has been even more dramatic when it comes to generative AI (GenAI) tools, which rose from 33% to 71% from 2023 to 2024. 

AI workflow automation tools are everywhere, but knowing how and when to apply them is critical to ensuring they deliver the efficiency benefits you're looking for.

In this post, we’re going to explore AI workflow automation. We’ll discuss the kinds of digital content problems that AI workflow tools can solve, and how digital experience platforms like Contentful are pushing its capabilities to help brands not only automate repetitive tasks for marketing teams, but supercharge the way they create content for their customers. 

Let’s dive in. 

What is AI workflow automation?

AI workflow automation describes the process of using AI technology to automate the tasks and processes that go into generating business outputs. 

In a content marketing context, that refers to content operations and the people, processes, and technologies that brands integrate in the creation, review, and publication of content within their digital ecosystem. 

Content management systems (CMSes) are typically the locus of content workflows, and so demonstrate the potential value of AI workflow automation and AI-powered tools. Key examples of that kind of automation include:  

• Generation of metadata and tags. 

• Personalization and localization of content. 

• Translation of content into different languages.

• Content suggestions or the generation of new pieces of content. 

• A/B testing and test variables.

• Notification of scheduled content publication. 

• Proofreading for alignment with legal or brand guidelines.  

Why should you automate your content workflows?

We’ve seen the kinds of things that AI workflow automation can do — but why do brands need to streamline their content operations in the first place?

Cost savings

AI-powered content workflows simply save companies money — by reducing wasted time, eliminating friction and pain points, and freeing up team members to use their skills more effectively on value-adding, revenue-driving projects. There are compound cost-savings to be made down the line too, just by virtue of having a smarter tech stack set up to capitalize on innovation.

Content scaling

As businesses grow, so do their content needs — and so content operations need to keep pace. But more content doesn’t necessarily mean better content and brands that scramble to generate a greater volume of content often struggle with “content chaos,” in which content quality degrades, and messaging becomes inconsistent. AI can help brands scale content workflows to meet new levels of demand, automating metadata tagging, translation, localization processes, and so on, with the click of a button, without sacrificing quality or consistency.  

Repetitive tasks

Content teams spend countless hours on mundane but necessary manual tasks — writing SEO tags, data entry, formatting content, proofreading content, localizing content for specific regions, translating content for different languages, and so on. Beyond freeing up skilled marketing team members for creative and strategic work (see our earlier point on cost savings), AI workflows make these employees’ lives better, which is obviously great for retention and morale. 

Fragmented brand voice

Content workflows are often spread across disconnected systems, with team members copying and pasting content as they write, review, translate, and publish. Handoffs between tools are tedious and complicated, and particularly error-prone — which means your teams frequently encounter delays as they move content through the pipeline.

Faster time-to-market

Nontechnical content teams often need to work with the support of developers or other technical team members — which can create bottlenecks and delays, and prevent brands working with the speed and agility that digital marketing typically demands. AI brings those barriers down, putting powerful technical capabilities in the hands of creators, editors, and marketers, in order to get content and campaigns out faster and more efficiently. 

Content consistency

Where multiple content team members are working within a content workflow, content such as metadata tags and alt text image tags may be applied inconsistently, or fall out of step with search trends. AI tools can be trained to follow brands and editorial guidelines, and SEO best practices, promoting consistency across all content fields. 

How does Contentful help brands automate content workflows?

The best AI workflow automation isn’t simply a means to reduce (or remove) manual effort and streamline processes, it’s about making content operations smoother from end to end and — probably the most important part — maximizing the value and creativity of your content teams. 

The Contentful digital experience platform (DXP) is built with this goal in mind. Our AI Actions feature builds GenAI automation into content workflows and business processes from the ground up — from content testing and experimentation, to personalization and translation. 

Each AI Action is accessible via a clickable button or menu in UI, and works in seconds. There’s a huge range of different AI Actions to automate tasks, which means you can integrate them into almost any content workflow — and if you can’t find a template that meets your specific needs, you can simply customize one with a prompt. 

Let’s look at some of the most useful ways that Contentful helps brands build and optimize automated AI workflows:

Optimizing keywords

You need your content to be visible to search engines and the best way of doing that is to include keywords. AI Actions adds natural-sounding keywords to your content automatically. You can set the density that you want the keywords added, and then go back if you need to tweak the text before publication.  

Outlining documents

The "Document outline" AI Action is for the beginning of the content creation process. It’s essentially a way to jumpstart whatever piece of content you’re planning to create while optimizing its search value. If you were planning a blog, for example, you’d input keywords and phrases, and the AI Action would generate a structured outline based on those inputs, and on top-ranking search results. 

Metadata tagging

Creating and adding metadata to content can be tedious and time-consuming. Some brands may have thousands of very similar pages to tag — which isn’t great news for human content teams working manually. AI Actions removes that manual burden with the capability to auto-generate meta descriptions, optimized for search in a matter of seconds. It’s a way to streamline the SEO process and add significant value to content production at scale.  

Image tagging

AI Actions can also help with image tagging — by generating alt text for images in seconds. Like the metadata tagging tool, the alt-text action scans the image content, and generates an alt-text suggestion based on that content. Content teams can roll out the action to manage image content at scale. 

Translation

If your content needs to serve audiences in multiple countries, you will likely need a workflow to translate text into the relevant languages. In the past, that might have meant having to copy and paste content to and from translation software, but AI Actions streamlines that work by enabling automatic translations from the comfort of the Contentful UI. Our algorithm utilizes neural networks and natural language processing to deliver natural-sounding translations, effectively emulating the styles and tones of human communication.

Personalization 

Personalization has become a critical step in driving engagement with audiences, and  Contentful uses AI to make the process easy, at scale. Contentful Personalization automates every step of the personalization workflow, from customer segmentation and A/B testing, to suggesting personalized content for customers. 

Go further with Contentful 

AI-powered workflow automation is here to stay, and the sooner your brand finds a way to use it effectively, the better placed you'll be to start reaping the benefits.

The AI automation examples listed above obviously aren’t exhaustive, but they serve to showcase the potential of Contentful’s GenAI innovations, and demonstrate how brands can transform their workflows by leveraging the technology effortlessly in their day-to-day business processes. 

And you don’t need to stop at AI Actions. The Contentful Marketplace is filled with apps and plugins to supercharge your AI-enabled workflows, bring out the best in your content teams, and take your content operations to the next level. If you’re ready to take that next step, you can browse the full range of AI Actions demos, or get in touch with our sales team to find out more.

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