AI Is Making Marketing Faster. That Might Be the Problem.

More content, more versions, more personalization, more campaigns, more analysis—and more ideas to review because generating 30 ideas is now considerably easier than deciding whether any of them are good. It's one of the stranger things happening inside companies right now. We've been handed technology with the potential to remove enormous amounts of work, and one of our first instincts has been to use it to increase the amount of work.

Marketing may be the perfect place to watch it happen. Adobe found that 96% of marketers had already seen content demand at least double over two years, with nearly two-thirds reporting increases of five times or more. That was before most companies had fully figured out what generative AI could do. Now the answer to an already enormous demand for content is a technology capable of creating an almost unlimited supply of it.

You can see the appeal. You can also see the problem.

For most of marketing's history, making something required enough time and money to impose a natural limit. You couldn't create 50 campaign concepts just because someone wondered what 50 campaign concepts might look like. Eventually, somebody had to pay for all of that wondering.

AI changes the economics of execution. The first draft is nearly free. So is the second. And the seventh. Creating another version no longer requires much of an argument for why another version should exist.

That's a production breakthrough, but it also moves the bottleneck. If producing something is no longer particularly difficult, deciding what deserves to be produced becomes much more important. And that isn't really an AI problem. It's a clarity problem.

This goes well beyond content. Deloitte's 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise found a significant increase in access to sanctioned AI tools in just one year. But 37% of organizations reported using AI with little or no change to the underlying process.

That number is interesting because it points to something remarkably easy to do: make a bad process faster.

Take a weekly report that requires four hours to compile. AI gets it down to 20 minutes. That's a measurable productivity gain, and probably one worth celebrating. But suppose almost nobody reads the report. Now we've saved three hours and 40 minutes producing something that perhaps shouldn't exist.

This is where some of the biggest AI opportunities are going to be missed. Companies are looking at everything they already do and asking where AI fits. The more interesting exercise is looking at everything they already do and asking what still needs to exist.

Those are very different questions.

There is an assumption buried inside most conversations about efficiency: when we save time, we'll get time back.

Businesses don't tend to work that way. Save someone five hours and those five hours rarely remain peacefully empty on their calendar. Capacity has a way of attracting things. Another project appears, another deliverable becomes possible, and yesterday's impressive turnaround quietly becomes tomorrow's baseline.

Before long, a tool that was supposed to reduce workload has helped establish an entirely new definition of how much work is reasonable.

Marketing teams have seen this movie before. Better technology has made it possible to manage more channels, collect more data, build more sophisticated campaigns and publish at a pace that would have seemed absurd not very long ago. Marketing did not become noticeably less complicated as a result. It became capable of doing more things.

Those are not the same outcome.

None of this is an argument for using less AI. Quite the opposite. There is a tremendous amount of work inside most companies that should be automated, accelerated or eliminated entirely. AI can free talented people from repetitive work and give them more time for the work that actually requires their expertise.

But “How can AI help us do this faster?” is only half the question.

The other half is: Why are we doing this?

Sometimes the answer will be obvious. The work matters, so make it faster. Sometimes the answer will be uncomfortable: nobody really knows.

That's where things get interesting. The biggest advantage AI gives a company may not be the ability to produce twice as much. It may be the opportunity to look at how the company works while everything is already being reconsidered—and decide that some of it doesn't need to come along.

AI can help us do more. We have plenty of practice with that.

Doing less, better? That could actually change something.