Your AI rollout made the first draft free, and your launch calendar didn’t move an inch. To be fair, one of the main reasons growing companies I worked for have benefited from working with me is that I ensure their marketing gets done. However, AI isn’t the fix all that many companies may expect.
Knak surveyed marketing teams and found that 85% missed at least one campaign launch date last year. The delays didn’t trace back to strategy or creative. They traced to production: the routing, the reviews, the version that goes back to legal for a second look.
Now set the other number beside it. 88% of those teams say AI output still needs moderate to substantial human editing.
Read them together and the shape of the problem shows up. AI sprints the first leg. Then it hands the baton into the same exchange zone that’s been fumbling it for years, and the baton it hands over needs more cleanup than a junior copywriter’s would.
Most teams bought speed for the fastest leg of the race.
Here’s the test, and it takes one afternoon. Pull your last four campaigns and time-stamp them twice: strategy, campaign brainstorming, brief to first draft, then first draft to live. My bet is the first number is measured in hours and the second in weeks. AI only touched the hours.
The counter-example is worth studying, because it shows what AI does compress. At SaaStr AI Day, Haya Kamola described how Backstory retiered its entire customer base in three days, an exercise that used to occupy five teams for a quarter. That one worked because account tiering is a judgment call with a single owner and no approval queue. Nobody has to sign off on a tier.
Content production is the opposite animal. Many owners, many gates, and every gate is a person with an opinion and a calendar.
So the play this quarter isn’t a better model. It’s counting the gates. How many humans touch a campaign email between draft and send at your company? Past three, your AI budget is buying a faster opening leg in a race you keep losing at the handoff.
If you want a defensible way to decide which tools survive that audit, Nielsen Norman Group’s PROVE framework tests one tool against one task instead of asking whether your team feels more productive. Their line is the one I’d tape to the wall: pressure to adopt AI isn’t evidence that a tool helps.
Worth Your Time
- How Salesforce rebuilt its PMM org for the AI era (Product Marketing Alliance): The piece lands on “stop building AI hacks, start building shared infrastructure,” which is the org-chart version of this week’s Take. Individual PMMs with clever prompts don’t compound; a shared system does.
- Marketers are funding AI search faster than they can measure it (Digiday): Budgets are moving well ahead of execution and measurement. If you’re carving out AI search spend this quarter, write down how you’ll know it worked before the money leaves, because nobody in this data set did.
- Protect your email program during a rebrand (Litmus): Everyone plans the logo and the site; almost nobody plans the sending domain. This is the unglamorous checklist that prevents a deliverability disaster nine months out, and it belongs in the rebrand brief on day one.
- The only two types of content AI can never make (Orbit Media): The answer is original research and firsthand experience, which is also the answer to “what should our content team do now?” Both are expensive, and that’s exactly why they still work.
- Jubel built the UK’s fruity beer category (System1): A useful reminder that creating a category and owning one are separate jobs, and the second is harder. Read it if you’re writing positioning that assumes first-mover status protects you.
- AI is a terrible ghostwriter (Tomasz Tunguz): The observation that stuck with me is that the quirks a writer puts in on purpose are the first thing an AI edit sands off. If your brand voice survives a model pass unchanged, it probably wasn’t distinctive enough to notice.
- Community pulse: over in r/marketing, the recurring question this week was how to report ChatGPT and Perplexity visibility to clients when the only tools on hand measure organic traffic and keyword rankings. Nobody had a clean answer. That gap is a consulting offer waiting to happen for whoever builds the reporting layer first.
How many humans touch a campaign between first draft and send at your shop? I suspect the number is higher than anyone wants to admit out loud.
Wondering where your growth engine is leaking? The Growth Gap Diagnostic at https://www.marketingtactician.com/growth-gap-diagnostic/ is where I’d start. Or just hit reply and tell me what you’re stuck on.