Five AI Tools Your Marketing Team Pays For — and What "Earning Its Keep" Actually Looks Like

By Midya U · Midya U Advisory

In brief: Renewal season is the moment to test every AI line item on the invoice: write one sentence naming who used the tool last week, on what task, and what shipped because of it. If the sentence writes itself, keep the tool. If you have to go ask around, you already have your answer. Run that test against the five subscriptions I see most in marketing teams — the writing assistant, image generator, meeting transcriber, website chatbot, and "AI insights" add-on — and most invoices get shorter.

Most marketing teams built their AI stack the same way. Someone tried a tool in 2023, it impressed in a demo, a card got charged, and the subscription has renewed on autopilot every year since. By 2026 a mid-sized team typically pays for five or six of them, and if you ask what each one did last month, the room goes quiet.

So here's a renewal-season exercise I like. For every AI line item on the invoice, write one sentence: who used it last week, on what task, and what shipped because of it. If the sentence writes itself, the tool stays. If you have to go ask around, you already have your answer.

Here are the five subscriptions I see most, and what earning its keep looks like for each.

Should you keep the writing assistant?

The promise was first drafts in seconds. The keep-test is how many published pieces started in the tool this month and reached publish with light edits, in your institution's voice. A writing assistant that produces drafts your team rewrites from scratch is a brainstorming toy billed as a production tool. Also check who's using it: if it's one enthusiast, you're paying for ten seats to serve one person's workflow.

Should you keep the image generator?

Somewhere on a shared drive is a folder of generated images, and it is worth opening. The keep-test is assets that made it into real campaigns, not experiments that made it into the folder. Count both. Teams are often surprised by the ratio, and by how much of the shipped work still comes from the same two stock libraries they were trying to replace.

Should you keep the meeting transcriber?

Every meeting now produces a transcript and a tidy summary. The keep-test is whether anyone opens them twice. A transcript someone searched three weeks later to settle what was agreed has paid for the month. Ten summaries nobody has read since the meeting ended tell you the opposite. This one earns its keep in a minority of teams I talk to, and the ones where it does have a habit the others don't: decisions from the summary get moved somewhere people work, the same day.

Should you keep the website chatbot?

This is the expensive one to get wrong, because it talks to applicants while you're not watching. The keep-test has two halves. Conversations that end in a completed action — an application started, an event registration, a real inquiry routed to a human. And zero wrong answers about tuition, deadlines, or admission requirements. That second half means someone has to read the transcripts. If nobody has since launch, you don't know what your chatbot has been telling prospective students all year, and I'd move that to the top of the list.

Should you keep the "AI insights" add-on?

The checkbox upsell inside a platform you already pay for — the CRM, the analytics suite, the social scheduler, each now with its own AI tier. The keep-test is the hardest of the five: name one decision that changed because of an insight the add-on surfaced. A dashboard that restates your numbers in sentences is not analysis, and the add-on often costs more than the standalone tools on this list. This one is almost always unnecessary.

One more thing the invoice won't show you. In many teams the AI doing the most real work is a personal ChatGPT or Claude account nobody procured, sitting outside your data policies with your draft copy and your applicant questions pasted into it. Your paid stack and your real stack can be two different lists. Knowing which is which matters as much as the renewal decisions, and it usually says something about which paid tools failed the sentence test and why.

If half your list can't produce the sentence, look at the workflows the tools were bolted onto before you blame the tools. That review, tool by tool and workflow by workflow, is part of what my Marketing Function Audit & Reset does.