New to AI Assist: translation, reference suggestions, image generation
Written by Marissa Ghassemian
Generative AI is going to be the tipping point for brands to finally achieve the promise of contextualized, personalized content at scale. While we’ve had the data to do so for years, we haven't had the capacity to create enough of the content.
But given just 14% of companies are using generative AI for marketing and sales messaging, that we haven’t quite reached that tipping point. A top barrier is that giving AI the right context and optimized tasks—critical for quality, trustworthy output—is too hard to do with disjointed workflows and busy content creators who don’t have time to perfect and operationalize prompts.
Sanity AI Assist,our built-in AI Assistant, first launched in the Summer of 2023, solves this with rich, built-in context and an integrated UI to create and scale high-impact prompts, giving your teams what they need to confidently put AI to work.
Today, we’re announcing our latest use cases: translation, reference suggestions, and image generation, all powered by Sanity AI Assist’s knowledge of the structured content you create and store in Sanity.
Modern content isn’t flat text
Structured content, a core value of Sanity, is what drives reuse to give you greater content ROI and ability to create connected, cohesive experiences across your customer journey.
Before we dive into the latest high-value tasks you can assign to AI Assist, let’s cover why it matters that the feature understands structured content. Going beyond the AI options of other CMSes, AI Assist can:
- Generate more than just field-level text because it knows your content types, components, and formatting: the structure of your content.
- Make rich connections between your content using its understanding of the meaning of everything you store in Sanity.
- Match your voice and guidance by ingesting any supplemental style guides or reference documents that inform your strategy.
With its understanding of structured content, AI Assist generates higher quality output and saves content teams from having to manually organize AI-generated text into the right fields and formatting.
Latest proven ways to put AI to use
When we launched AI Assist we started by taking tedious tasks off of your team's plates. From SEO work to staging content from Google Docs into the CMS to suggesting variants for A/B testing or personalization, we continue to hear from customers about how much time they’re saving on chores.
With this update, we’re adding support for three new use cases, delivering on the highest-demand jobs users have asked for so far.
High-quality, one-click translation
One of the most meaningful ways to personalize content is to translate for each region you serve. Doing so can be costly, both in terms of expense and time. Now, you can translate directly in Sanity Studio, dramatically streamlining your workflow.
AI Assist’s understanding of your content structure means it can translate entire documents at once, so you don’t have to tediously translate field–by-field across a page or resource. AI Assist will parse all elements of your content translating everything from buttons to embedded quotes, maintaining the original formatting even in complex, deeply nested documents.
That said, for some translation strategies you only want to translate specific fields within a document. For example, if you have a product, place, or person’s name that shouldn’t be translated. With AI Assist, you can granularly control which fields to include or exclude before hitting “run” on the instruction.
Some content will be safe to publish without a human in the loop, but often you’ll want a native speaker to QA the translation. With Sanity you can create workflows to send translated content to an expert to review, and they can easily adjust as needed.
Whether you’re translating content across a couple of locales or have hundreds of languages to account for, AI Assist can support your scale. Sanity uses trusted LLMs under the hood, keeping an eye to advancements as they come so you benefit from best-in-breed services.
More discoverable connected content
Content that doesn’t reach your audience can’t do its job. Much of your most valuable content was likely written months or years ago, and as your content library grows, it becomes harder for content teams—especially newer hires—to find the most compelling related content.
The next use case, reference suggestions, makes it far easier to surface existing content that will enrich your experiences. AI Assist understands what all your content is about—without relying on well-maintained tagging or categorization—so it can shine a light on the hidden gems in your collection that might have gone unnoticed.
Your content creators now have a curator with an elephant’s memory embedded on their team. This frees them up to focus on what they do best: experimenting with new engagement strategies and crafting top-notch content.
On-the-fly, in-context imagery
When building content, having a sense of the layout as you work often speeds the process for content creators. As copywriters and designers collaborate, there will always be dependencies on story and strategy before assets can be created.
One of our favorite ways to put the new built-in image generation is to use it as “visual lorem ipsum,” turning the age-old designer strategy of placeholder copy on its ear. As creators work within Sanity Studio, they can get a sense of how many images they need to support their content and brainstorm some early concepts. It’s a great way to speak the language of your design partners.
With AI Assist, the prompts you create are augmented with full understanding of the document where the image will be added. Given the importance of context for image generation, this provides a built-in quality boost.
While we don’t think we’re close to replacing designers when it comes to bespoke imagery and illustrations, there are some basic use cases where AI can generate a more compelling option than a stock photo search. When appropriate, it’s a great way to accelerate content timelines and reduce capacity pressure on your designers.
Getting Started with AI Assist
Sanity AI Assist is leading the way into a new chapter of content creation. It isn't just a helper but a smart, intuitive partner that gets your creative goals. We're stepping away from the ordinary AI that could only do so much, and welcoming a streamlined approach that really digs into what makes your content impactful.
To see AI Assist in action, check out this demo from Solution Engineers Ken and Carolina and explore the docs. For those on Sanity’s Growth plan and above, give AI Assist a try today!