My AI marketing team has a professor, a writer and a slick salesperson. Yours can, too.

Steeped in AI for over two years, I’ve come to see my team of LLMs — ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini — as specialists, each with a unique personality.

On the surface, they all let you interact in natural language and build customizable AI assistants — Custom GPTs, Claude Projects and Gemini Gems. But under the hood, they’re very different.

For digital marketers like us, knowing these nuances is the key to using the right LLM at the right moment. Let’s pull back the curtain and meet the team.

Meeting the three AI personas

After plenty of trial and error — and a few head-scratching moments — I treated each platform as a persona, a way to capture its core strengths and to know which one to call for the job.

The Professor: Google Gemini Gems

You know, that one professor with a photographic memory can connect a thousand different ideas into one brilliant concept? That’s Gemini. It’s serious, academic and a master of deep research. 

When I need to index the web for a huge topic or dive deep into a complex subject, I go to Gemini. It’s also my go-to for creating a new Gem or custom bot because the responses feel incredibly professional and well-researched.

The Writer: Claude Projects

If The Professor is about facts, The Writer is about the story. Claude served as my writing team for my upcoming book, “Hyperadaptive: Rewiring the Enterprise to Become AI-Native.” 

It was a development editor, a copy editor and a fantastic partner for shaping the narrative arc. Claude helped me turn a pile of research and notes into a cohesive story, which, as any writer knows, is a creative act of magic.

The Salesperson: ChatGPT Custom GPTs

This one is the friendly, cool salesperson who knows a little about everything. It’s great for everyday tasks because it’s so versatile. 

Need to brainstorm ideas quickly? Want a simple answer to a question? ChatGPT is your guy. It’s not a master of nuance and the writing is bland, but if you need to create an image with text on it or get a quick answer, it’s a no-brainer.

Dig deeper: Meet my research team: Gemini, ChatGPT and Perplexity

The technical superpowers behind the scenes

These personas are both a vibe and a direct result of the technology that powers them.

The Professor’s seamless integration

Google’s Gemini Gems are built to live inside the Google ecosystem. They provide secure, native access to Drive, Gmail and Calendar — no clunky APIs are required.

Create a Gem with simple instructions and it immediately works with your documents, saving vast amounts of time. The tradeoff: there’s no public store, making it powerful but private.

Gems deliver a streamlined, super-fast experience for anyone in Google’s ecosystem.

The Writer’s massive brain

Claude’s strength is its massive context window — 200,000 tokens, enough to hold an entire novel in short-term memory. It was the perfect partner for writing my book. It could remember the whole narrative, essential concepts and the key themes. 

This is a game-changer for marketers building long-form articles or complex content series. Public forums also praise Claude for producing human-sounding and creative content, especially from large source docs.

The Salesperson’s versatility

ChatGPT is the generalist of the bunch — the most user-friendly and able to do a little of everything. Its robust toolset, with web browsing and image generation via DALL-E, is a massive bonus for marketers.

Creating a Custom GPT is so easy it almost feels like magic, and its public-facing store makes it a strong choice for customer-facing bots. That said, it’s not without quirks: some users say its responses can feel watered down, and it sometimes struggles with highly specific or complex instructions.

Dig deeper: 7 tips for getting started with AI agents and automations

What this means for marketers

The real lesson here, and one of the core ideas from my book, is to use AI to become a more agile and responsive organization. Instead of forcing one tool to do everything, you can use these different AI personas to build a fluid, adaptive marketing workflow.

For strategy, call on The Professor

Use a Gem to analyze market research, competitor reports and customer feedback from Google Drive. Its deep research capabilities help you make sense of large data sets and inform long-term strategy, ensuring your decisions are data-driven.

For content creation, bring in The Writer 

When you’re crafting a thought leadership piece, developing a campaign narrative or building a comprehensive content calendar, let Claude be your creative partner. 

Upload your research and brand guidelines and let its massive context window help you create something unique and cohesive.

For daily tasks, partner with The Salesperson

Need a quick headline for a social media post? Use a Custom GPT. Need to find a quick statistic for an email? Ask it to browse the web. Its ability to handle an array of quick tasks frees you to focus on the bigger strategic picture.

Bringing the AI team together

The beauty of this approach is thoughtfully integrating the right tool for the right job — saving time and producing better results. While I use the paid versions of all these tools, the cost feels like a small price to have The Professor, The Writer and The Salesperson on my side.

Dig deeper: Lessons from letting AI vibe code a landing page