Transforming Marketing Video Workflow With an AI-Based Tool

No matter how strategic you may want your shift to AI-based marketing to be—thoughtful plans, SWOT analysis, query all the “experts”—one of the best ways to drive change is to roll up your sleeves and start somewhere. That’s what we did with video post-production. So, this article is lessons-learned.

We use tons of video in marketing. Consumer demand for inspiring, instructional, and otherwise useful video from brands has never been higher. It has always been more expensive to produce good-quality video that’s truly fit-for-purpose for marketing. And while I remain a true believer in working with great video creatives, the workflow from post-production for marketing to publishing and promoting online is hinky as hell. We discovered ways AI can help today.

72% of consumers prefer video for product discovery, and 54% want more video content from brands. And over half of businesses are increasing their video marketing budgets. (source: Wistia)

Most of the press on AI and video focuses on the magical scenes created with Runway Gen-4, Google’s Veo or OpenAI’s Sora. Or that Netflix used AI to create a building collapse scene in the worth-watching Argentinian series, Eternauts. But the most immediate opportunity with AI is improving workflow.

Brands can streamline their video workflows to reduce production costs while empowering their best creatives to focus on their greatest value: high-quality storytelling and aesthetics. This means using AI-based tools to handle the grunt work. The challenge is that the web is exploding with new AI marketing tools, and it's hard to know which ones are worth your time. Over the last twelve months, my team and I have been testing and using different tools to save time and/or produce a better result. One of those tools, Descript, has become an indispensable assistant producer and assistant editor that simplifies the entire workflow in our creative team.

The Short Story For Video Workflow

Descript is a game-changer because it allows you to edit video as simply as you would a Word document. Its AI automatically transcribes your video, letting you make cuts and edits by deleting text. This feature alone dramatically reduces production time. Beyond that, Descript acts as a comprehensive hub for recording, editing, collaboration, and repurposing content, bundling a host of previously siloed tasks into one intuitive platform. You can generate “very good” episode descriptions for YouTube, as well as solid social posts with all the same control you expect working with ChatGPT or Gemini. It helps teams of any size—from a single creator to a global marketing department—finish video content at the speed of business, making it a powerful asset for both efficiency and quality.

Who Should Use This AI-Based Video Platform

Based on my team’s experience, Descript provides the most value to:

• Content Marketers & Strategists: Professionals who need to quickly transform long-form content (like webinars and podcasts) into all of the short, shareable clips used across social media and video channels like YouTube.

• Product Marketers: Anyone responsible for creating product demos, tutorials, or explainer videos who needs to record their screen, themselves, and edit it all together in one place, quickly.

• Small Business Owners: Entrepreneurs with limited time and resources who need to produce high-quality video for their social channels and website without a huge budget or a dedicated video team. Hire your video creative team to do the most important work—that big, beautiful video—and use Descript to create the derivatives.

• Marketing Leaders & Managers: Those who need a collaborative platform to streamline feedback and approvals, ensuring brand consistency and accelerating project timelines across a team.

Biggest Benefits for Video Marketing Workflow

Adopting Descript isn't just a shift in tools; it's a shift in mindset that delivers clear, quantifiable benefits to a marketing team.

• Drastically Reduced Editing Time: The core text-based editing feature is the ultimate time-saver. It allows video producers to communicate with their editor by making changes and suggestions directly in the transcript, which can then generate an edit decision list (EDL) readable by all professional edit platforms. Cutting out a long pause or removing a section of a monologue is as fast as hitting the backspace key, eliminating hours of painstaking work on a traditional timeline.

• Democratizes Video Production: Descript lowers the barrier to entry for video creation. It allows anyone on the team—a content writer, a brand manager, or a social media specialist—to make meaningful edits, freeing up a dedicated video editor for more complex, high-production projects.

• Streamlines Collaboration: The platform’s real-time collaboration features eliminate the inefficient "feedback loop." Stakeholders can leave time-stamped comments directly on the transcript, and editors can address notes instantly, keeping projects moving forward without endless email chains.

• Simplifies Content Repurposing: In a single workflow, you can easily turn a 45-minute webinar into a series of short social media clips (e.g. YouTube Shorts). The ability to automatically generate captions and adjust aspect ratios for different platforms means you can get more mileage out of every piece of content you create.

• Consistent, High-Quality Output: With features like Brand Kits and custom templates, Descript helps maintain a consistent visual identity across all videos. This is a massive win for marketing leaders who need to ensure brand standards are met without a lengthy manual review process.

• All-in-One Workflow: Descript bundles key operations—recording, transcribing, editing, adding music/B-roll, and publishing—into one platform. This consolidates your MarTech stack and avoids the friction of moving files between multiple tools.

Two Interesting Features

Beyond the well-known text-based editing, Descript offers a few surprising features that can enhance your workflow. These are the tools that often go unnoticed until you need them, and they showcase the platform's forward-thinking AI capabilities.

• Overdub & AI Voices: This feature allows you to clone a speaker’s voice after training it on a short audio sample. With Overdub, you can correct a mistake in a recording or even add a new sentence or phrase without having to re-record. This is a huge time-saver for minor errors that would otherwise require a full reshoot or an audible jump cut. You can also generate speech from a variety of AI voices, which is perfect for creating quick, professional voiceovers for product explainers or animated videos without needing a human narrator.

• Filler Word Removal (and how to use it wisely): While a lot of tools can do this, Descript’s is robust and highly useful. It goes beyond just "ums" and "ahs" to include common phrases like "you know" and "I mean." The "interesting" part is the ability to remove all instances of a filler word with a single click—but also the wisdom to know when not to. The truly skilled marketer will use this feature strategically, leaving in a few natural pauses and filler words to maintain authenticity while cutting out the bulk that distracts from the message. Your truly skilled video editor is used to doing this and has analogous AI tools built into their Adobe Premiere or DaVinci Resolve platform.

NOTE: Tools like this can improve workflow and collaboration between a marketer and a creative video editor. Don’t try to replace the valuable creatives you work with. Their eye and sensibility are crucial to high-quality work. Use AI to augment and dispense with the grunt work.

As a marketing strategy guy and a business owner, this post felt a little tactical. But that’s what is changing with AI. I ran into a friend who owns a terrific law firm, and he shared about spending half a day building AI agents for his business himself. We can’t just deputize the intern, the entry-level marketer, or the law associate to develop our application of AI. We need to roll up our sleeves to do it ourselves.