Sara Brooks — Chief Growth Officer at BetterHelp, the largest online therapy platform in the world — has built her career on being early to the technologies that reshape how brands connect with people. But when it came to bringing her own team along on AI, she learned that adoption doesn’t start with a mandate. It starts with a leader willing to do the work themselves.
Sara sat down recently with WRITER CMO Diego Lomanto to share how she’s building an AI-native marketing engine at BetterHelp — watch the full conversation.
Helping the team see what’s possible
Sara has been building with AI since before it was easy. Back in 2024, before agents were a thing, she was building her own AI agent for personal use and spending Saturday mornings prompt-engineering how people might discover the BetterHelp brand.
As her own use of AI accelerated, Sara realized that adoption across a broader organization required more than simply giving people access to the tools. The CMOs she spoke with were split between building dedicated AI organizations and assuming adoption would happen naturally. Sara had been in the latter camp. She quickly changed course. Her takeaway was that teams needed to see what was possible, understand where AI could genuinely make their work better, and have the space to experiment.
What she came to understand was that the hesitation wasn’t about the technology at all. It was about a genuine passion for the craft. “If you’re a writer, of course, you’re still gonna write. If you’re a designer, of course, you’re still gonna design,” Sara tells her team. The point isn’t to take the craft away — it’s to take away some of the repetitive production work so teams have more time for the work that requires distinctly human thinking. That means more time for the next campaign, the creative concept, the strategy.
Building the AI Excellence function — and why WRITER
To help accelerate adoption across the marketing organization, Sara created a dedicated AI Excellence function. She found the person on her team who was already experimenting deeply with AI and helping others learn, and cleared 50% of her time to build BetterHelp’s AI-native marketing tech stack and drive adoption.
When her AI Excellence lead brought WRITER to her, the first question was the obvious one: how is this different from other AI providers on the market? The answer was in the architecture. WRITER stores BetterHelp’s brand voice, tone, colors, patterns, and personas — the building blocks of the brand — in one place. When the team generates content, it’s grounded in their brand and context, not generic output. WRITER isn’t the only tool in their stack, but it’s one of the core pieces, and it sits at the center of creative execution.
The initial use case that got teams excited internally was slide decks. “It made some really killer decks,” Sara says. “That visibility opened the door to deeper playbook adoption across brand, performance, and creative functions.
Deep dive: The shift Sara is leading — from execution to architecture, curation, and orchestration.
The end-to-end agentic campaign flow — and the results
The team’s most significant build was an end-to-end, AI-native agentic flow for creating campaigns. Sara assembled a small four-person cross-functional team — spanning brand, creative, performance, and product marketing. Their objective was to build the agentic flow, put the campaign in market, and compare it against a non-AI approach. Not only should there be time savings — the quality should be better too.
The workflow moves through connected stages: persona strategy at the top, the brief flowing into WRITER where brand information and actual assets are stored, then performance data — top-performing paid social assets, hooks, formats, time-length specs — fed in so WRITER produces the creative informed by real results. Human curation runs throughout.
The team applied this to BetterHelp’s State of Stigma report — an annual research initiative for Mental Health Awareness Month that examines how people feel about their mental wellness worldwide. They fed the report, their personas, and their top-performing paid social assets into WRITER, which produced sharp, emotionally resonant creative assets. Then they ran it as an A/B test — a traditional campaign vs. a WRITER-assisted campaign.
“We were able to take those stats, and we were able to turn them into really strong emotional hooks, using what we’ve learned in the past and what we know to be true to prompt WRITER to give us really sharp paid social assets.” Sara BrooksChief Growth Officer, BetterHelp
“We were able to take those stats, and we were able to turn them into really strong emotional hooks, using what we’ve learned in the past and what we know to be true to prompt WRITER to give us really sharp paid social assets.”
Sara BrooksChief Growth Officer, BetterHelp
Leading from the front
Sara’s philosophy is straightforward: leaders shouldn’t just tell their teams to use AI. They should transform themselves with AI first. She calls it leading from the front, and she means it literally — she runs WRITER workflows herself, every day.
One of her top use cases is a brand sentiment playbook she built in WRITER. It aggregates a 360-degree view of the BetterHelp brand across every touchpoint — earned media, organic social, their WNBA sponsorships, and the podcasts where they advertise — and surfaces what’s being said, how it’s trending, and what she should do next.
“I run it at the beginning of almost every day, and I distribute it out to the team with my own thoughts.” Sara BrooksChief Growth Officer, BetterHelp
“I run it at the beginning of almost every day, and I distribute it out to the team with my own thoughts.”
Sara BrooksChief Growth Officer, BetterHelp
Before WRITER, this was a fragmented process — multiple teams looking at data in isolation, Sara chasing reports. Now she can pull it all together herself from a 30,000-foot view and show teams what’s possible.
The Little League parking lot
The story that best captures Sara’s hands-on approach unfolded on a Friday afternoon. A campaign was meant to go live Monday, and a video asset needed wasn’t ready yet. She didn’t want to bleed into her team’s weekend — “We’re a mental health company, after all. I try to be very protective of people’s time” — but the campaign had to be right.
She went into BetterHelp’s digital asset manager, found a batch of content, and prompted WRITER with the brand voice, tone, and the copy banks the team had built. She flipped on her hotspot, put her laptop in the backseat with her younger son — “had him keep the cursor going” — and drove to her son’s Little League playoff game. By the second inning, she had a full suite of deliverables. End to end: 45 minutes.
“I haven’t video edited anything in years,” Sara notes. But the strategy was already tight, the creative was already built, and the brand voice was already stored in WRITER. She just needed to curate the inputs and let the tool execute.
Guardrails: protecting the human craft
For BetterHelp, AI adoption isn’t about replacing craft. It’s about protecting it. AI speeds up execution while people own the strategy, creative judgment, and the final output. In order to do that at scale, the guardrails around this process become non-negotiable.
The standard is simple: the output cannot read or look like AI created it. “Without the right inputs, you do get AI slop,” Sara warns. The team assigns clear ownership for who builds and refreshes each skill, ensuring the curation work that was always done in one-offs is now documented, versioned, and consistently applied. If you’re a WRITER, you’re still going to write. AI takes the production work nobody enjoys — making 20 versions of the same thing — and frees people to work on the craft they love.
What Sara wants other leaders to know
When asked what advice she’d give to CMOs making decisions about AI without fully understanding what the technology can do, Sara’s answer is practical: pick one thing that’s already in the market and make it 10% better with AI. Low stakes, but start somewhere. Frameworks, she notes, are helpful for checking your vision — but the momentum has to come first. “It only works when people are feeling the energy and the momentum, and then you can corral that into a framework.”
At BetterHelp’s summer intern showcase, every intern across every function presented their final project with AI at the core — without direction. The next generation is already there. The question for today’s leaders is whether they’ll meet them. Sara sees AI as the biggest technological wave of her career: “We’ve seen the internet. We’ve seen mobile. We’ve seen social, and AI is bigger and faster than all of that.” For leaders willing to lead from the front, the opportunity is to do what Sara tells her team every day: the best work of their lives.
Watch Sara’s recent conversation with WRITER CMO, Diego Lomanto here.
