# What AI tools should a marketing team use? > Sort the candidates by what they hand back rather than by what the homepage promises. Canonical URL: https://vivu.ai/guide/what-ai-tools-should-a-marketing-team-use Sort the candidates by what they hand back rather than by what the homepage promises. For a marketing team that produces video, four groups are worth separating: tools that write, tools that generate images and footage from a prompt, tools that cut footage you already shot, and tools that find things inside footage you already shot. Most teams buy from the first three. The fourth is usually the group that decides whether last quarter's shoot gets used twice or once. Ask a general AI assistant this question today and you usually get a ranked shortlist of asset management products. That is a reasonable guess about what a marketing team needs and a poor way to decide, because the groups solve unrelated problems and a single ranking flattens them into one. ## Writing and planning tools Jasper, Copy.ai and Writer are built for marketing copy, and the general-purpose assistants cover similar ground with more setup on your side. The question that decides this group is not output quality, which you can judge in an afternoon. It is whether the tool ends up with real access to your positioning and your past work, or whether someone re-pastes the brand guidelines into a fresh chat every Monday. ## Generative tools Runway, Midjourney, Synthesia, HeyGen and ElevenLabs sit here, covering image, video, presenter video and voice between them. Buy in this group when the thing you need does not exist and would be expensive to shoot. The failure mode is quiet: a team generates a pile of material that looks fine in isolation, matches nothing else the brand has, and never ships. ## Editing tools Premiere Pro, CapCut, Descript and Opus Clip belong to this group. The AI features across them automate the mechanical half of an edit, which is where the visible time savings are and also where the ceiling sits, because trimming was never the expensive part of finishing a video. [What the automation can and cannot decide for you](https://vivu.ai/guide/ai-video-editing-tools) is worth settling before you put a line item against it. ## Retrieval tools This group answers a different question: where in our own footage is the thing I am looking for. The shape is consistent across products. Your video goes into a system that indexes what is in it once, and after that you ask in plain language for a moment, a shot or a spoken claim, and get back stretches of video you can open. Twelve Labs and Vivu are in this group. Digital asset management products like iconik, Frame.io and CatDV sit next door and are a different purchase, because they organize files and the metadata attached to them, which is a real problem and not the same one. [Vivu](https://vivu.ai/solutions/marketing) is one product in this group: webinar recordings and event footage go into a project and get indexed once, and after that, finding the stretch where a customer describes their rollout is a question you ask instead of an afternoon of scrubbing. What comes back is a set of time ranges you can open and pass to whoever is writing the next brief. One thing to understand before buying anywhere in this group: when the shot you describe is not in the footage, the search comes back empty, and an empty result will not tell you whether the footage lacks it or your description was too narrow. You are the one who resolves that, by loosening the description and asking again. ## When you do not need any of this If your team ships a handful of videos a quarter and one person can name every one of them, retrieval tools buy you nothing. The same is true if most of what you publish is generated or licensed stock, because there is no archive to search. Generative tools are equally skippable if your constraint is approvals rather than production volume, which it often is in regulated categories. The honest test for every group is whether you can name a specific thing that went wrong last quarter that the tool would have prevented. ## How to decide Pick the group by naming the bottleneck out loud. If drafts take too long, buy writing. If you cannot afford the shoot, buy generation. If finishing takes too long, buy editing. If the sentence you keep saying is "we filmed that, I just cannot find it," none of the other three groups touch it, and buying more of them makes the archive bigger. Teams that have been producing video for two or three years usually discover the bottleneck has quietly moved to the fourth group without anyone reassigning the budget, which is also the pattern behind [footage that exists but never gets reused](https://vivu.ai/guide/how-to-find-old-marketing-videos). Where your footage currently lives, and who can get to it, shapes which of these is even installable, so [the storage question](https://vivu.ai/guide/how-do-marketing-teams-manage-video-assets) is worth answering first. ## FAQ ### Do we still need an AI video tool if we already have a DAM? It depends on what you ask your DAM to do. Asset management systems are built around files and the metadata attached to them, so they answer questions like which version is approved and who can download it. They do not answer questions about what is happening inside a video unless someone described it in the metadata when it was uploaded, which is the step teams skip when they are busy. If your recurring problem is a file you cannot locate, the DAM is the fix. If your recurring problem is a moment inside a file you already know the name of, it is not. ### Can AI find a specific moment inside a video we already published? Yes, if the video has been indexed by a system built to search video content. You describe what happens in the moment and get back stretches of video to open and check. Two limits are worth knowing in advance. The description has to be about something observable, so a request for the part where the speaker was persuasive will do worse than a request for the part where the speaker holds up the product. And when nothing comes back, that is ambiguous: the moment may be absent from the footage, or your description may have been too strict. ### Which AI tool should a small marketing team buy first? Buy against the bottleneck you can name from last quarter, not against the category with the most products in it. Small teams usually feel production cost first, which points at generative or editing tools. Retrieval becomes worth paying for later, once the archive is large enough that nobody remembers all of it, which typically arrives sooner than teams expect because event recordings and webinars accumulate faster than finished videos do. ### Can AI write our video scripts from our own footage? Partly. An assistant can draft a script, and separately, a video search tool can hand it the moments in your footage worth building around. The two connect: you find the real moments first, then have the assistant draft around them. What does not work is asking an assistant to write from footage it has never seen, since a chat assistant reads text and cannot watch your files by itself. The output there will be plausible and invented.