By Claire Rock
Our industry is already using artificial intelligence (AI) in meaningful ways. It’s improving our products, shaping how we service customers, and finding its way into operations across the business. That’s the conversation most people are having.
But I want to make a case for a parallel conversation we’re not having loudly enough: How are we setting up our internal teams to actually benefit from AI? I’m speaking from the marketing seat, but this isn’t a marketing-only issue. It touches every function that must communicate, sell, or support what we build.
From one-off shortcut to structural change
Most of us started using AI the same way: a faster first draft here, a quicker subject line test there. It felt like a productivity hack. But something bigger is happening beneath the surface. AI isn’t just speeding up individual tasks. It’s prompting us to rethink how teams are structured, what institutional knowledge looks like, and what it actually means for marketing to support the wider business.
In parking, this matters a lot. Our products are complex. The buyers are varied: Consider, for example, a vice president of operations at a stadium, a university facilities director, or a municipality modernizing its downtown. Sales teams are expected to speak confidently across all sectors of the industry. Yet historically, getting that product and persona knowledge out of people’s heads and into a format that actually helps someone in a discovery call has been hard.
The foundation problem
Before AI can help you do anything useful, you must give it something to work with. That’s forced a discipline that, honestly, marketing should have had all along: documented product knowledge, defined personas, clear messaging hierarchies, and a codified brand voice. That last one is easy to overlook, but it matters just as much.
When you build those foundations well, AI becomes a genuine force multiplier, helping sales teams get up to speed faster, selecting the right language for handling objections, and generating channel-specific content that actually sounds like it belongs to your brand.
When you skip the step of giving AI something to work with, you get generic output that makes your company sound like everyone else. In this case, AI isn’t the problem. The missing foundation is.
What this looks like in practice
AI is changing the work across the channels we manage, including paid media, customer relationship management (CRM), branding, creative content, and events. However, these changes happen differently in each channel.
In paid media, AI is reshaping how we build keyword strategies and landing page briefs: faster iteration, broader coverage, and more time spent on analysis rather than harvesting. In CRM, it helps us personalize at scale across verticals without multiplying headcount. In brand and creative, it’s a useful thought partner for developing concepts and a capable production assistant for preparing first drafts. But the judgment about what’s on-brand, what’s true to the company’s voice, and what’s actually going to land with a specific buyer in a specific moment? That still sits with us.
What ties all of this together isn’t the tool. It’s the process design. Teams that are seeing real results aren’t just using AI more; they’re thinking deliberately about where human judgment is irreplaceable and where AI can carry the load. That’s a team design question as much as a technology question.
What we should be talking about more
The parketing community, those of us sitting at the intersection of parking and marketing, has a real opportunity to lead this conversation. We understand the complexity of what we sell. We know the buyers. We know the seasonal rhythms, the compliance considerations, the difference between a stadium client and a healthcare system. And we understand how this industry actually works: the relationships, the procurement cycles, the dynamics that don’t show up in any brief.
That context is what AI can’t replicate on its own. Nor can it replicate strategy: knowing which problem to solve, which audience to prioritize, which moment is the right one to go to market. AI can execute against a strategy. It can’t build one for you, yet.
In our industry conversations, I’d love to see more honest discussion about how we’re building for this shift internally. Not just which tools we’re using, but how we’re documenting what we know, how we’re helping sales and revenue teams benefit from it, and how we’re staying accountable to quality as the volume of output increases. Marketing can help drive that. But it must be a shared investment across an organization.
AI is reshaping what small, lean marketing teams can accomplish. But the teams doing it well aren’t outsourcing their thinking. They’re using AI to amplify it. In an industry built on real-world complexity, this distinction matters more than ever.
CLAIRE ROCK is the senior director of B2B marketing for JustPark. She can be reached at [email protected], while the collective can be reached at [email protected].
