This post was created in partnership with Hootsuite
Social signals are scattered across a fragmented media landscape, and the brands that win know how to find them—and put them to work.
During a Brandweek 2026 fireside chat co-hosted with Hootsuite, Ryan Joe, editor-in-chief of ADWEEK, sat down with Christina O’Reilly, CMO of Hootsuite, to discuss how marketers are using AI tools to build effective social strategies.
A double-edged sword
As technology has evolved, O’Reilly explained, so has the social media manager role. Instead of writing, designing, publishing, and testing the content itself, today’s social media managers are more “architects or directors of AI agents” that autonomously manage the production workflows.
“Social media managers are being asked to play more of a strategic role in the organization,” she said, helping to funnel important signals from the social ecosystem back to the organization.
O’Reilly described the shift as a double-edged sword. By reducing social media managers’ workload, AI agents allow them to be more strategic. But AI agents also risk replacing a crucial human element. “It takes them away from that intuition, that human side we all can’t walk away from,” she cautioned.
AI may be good at sifting through reams of data, but humans can ensure the right tools are being used for the job. O’Reilly pointed to an analysis Hootsuite ran for a beauty retailer fielding customer complaints. One general-purpose AI tool surfaced years-old data completely irrelevant to the current problems. Hootsuite’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) connectors, meanwhile, used real-time data to narrow down the complaints to their source: a product that had gone out of stock.
“You really need to make sure that your AI tool is grounded in that real-time data,” she concluded. “Otherwise, you’re acting on old signals.”
Authenticity above all
Asked if brands need different strategies for different social platforms, O’Reilly offered some broader wisdom: Wherever you are, be true to who you are.
“Your customers are everywhere, and they’re receiving information in different zones,” she advised. “Be authentic, true to your brand, but then adapt according to where they are on the platforms.”
She applied the same logic to short-form video, arguing that quality trumps length.
“I would be far more interested in a 60-second video that gives me what I’m looking for than 12 seconds of fluff,” she said.
Closing out the conversation, O’Reilly considered what it actually means for a social media manager to be AI-savvy. What matters most, she said, is not technical prowess but an ability to understand and adapt without sacrificing your own judgment.
“To be AI-savvy is to come in and be the spokesperson for your organization, helping it understand how you can use the workflows and optimize the work, while also realizing that there’s still that human side, that balance that you need to bring to the table,” O’Reilly explained.
