Holistic Email Marketing

AI made marketing faster than it made marketing better

By Kath Pay

AI can accelerate production, but it can’t decide what’s worth making, who it’s for, or how success should be measured.

AI has made many parts of marketing faster. But faster production hasn’t magically given marketers more time. Nor has it automatically made the work better.

In my recent MarTech article, “Why AI hasn’t solved marketing’s time problem,” I showed why AI didn’t give us marketers the strategic breathing room we expected from a streamlined process.

Why? Because faster first drafts don’t fix approval bottlenecks, unclear workflows, creative delays, or cross-team coordination problems.

Faster creation has also exposed another problem: It doesn’t produce better decisions. The real constraint in many marketing teams isn’t simply how long it takes to write, build, or launch the work. It’s how long the team needs to decide what the work should be, who it’s for, what it’s meant to change, how it should be judged, and whether it should exist in the first place.

The bottleneck was never just the writing

Generative AI promised us many things in the early days, like fewer blank screens while we waited for inspiration to arrive. We could expect better copy with fewer rewrites and easier repurposing for social media, blog posts, or sales sheets.

Most seductively, AI implied we could put the time we saved to better uses, like strategy, planning, creativity, and optimization. (Or maybe that’s what we assumed.)

Some of that happened. First drafts arrive faster, and we no longer dread the inevitable request to write them five different ways.

But the usual bumps in the marketing process didn’t disappear. AI can accelerate parts of the process, but it doesn’t remove the need for analysis and decision-making, whether it’s checking creative briefs, evaluating the audience, offer, and journey-building, interpreting data and results, or getting the campaign approved.

Faster content production creates more material to debate, revise, approve, reject, or rebuild. If your decision-making process is slow, unclear, political, poorly informed, or constantly revisited, then congratulations! You now have 10 versions of the thing nobody wanted.

Faster output can expose weaker thinking

Earlier this year, in “AI made email marketing easier. It needs us to make it better,” I argued that AI can create decent email quickly, but marketers must provide the strategy, judgment, customer understanding, and critical thinking that make the work worth sending.

Now we have another issue to address: AI reveals weak thinking faster.

In the before times, a campaign took longer from creation to launch because someone had to write it, rewrite it, brief the designer, chase the approvals, and pull the data manually. Production effort could hide strategic uncertainty. The team was busy with concurrent demands.

Today, AI can remove some of that friction. But it also exposes underlying uncertainty:

  • AI will produce a confident version of a weak brief. It won’t tell you what the brief is missing.
  • AI can’t clarify a nebulous strategy unless someone knows which questions to ask.
  • AI fills gaps in customer insights with generic assumptions.
  • Got a vague measurement plan? AI might summarize results without helping anyone understand what actually changed.
  • With a broken approval process, AI might create more options for people to disagree over.

This is why “AI made the draft faster” isn’t the same as “AI made the marketing better.” The output quality still depends on the thinking quality that went into it.

More options don’t always create better decisions

AI is brilliant at producing options for headlines, subject lines, campaign angles, customer segments, content variations, test plans, journey branches, and copy variations based on urgency.

That can be helpful. But more options can also become another form of clutter if the team hasn’t defined what good looks like.

Without a clear strategy, the decision comes down to personal preferences, and you know what can happen then. The loudest opinion in the room starts masquerading as customer insight.

AI can generate choices, but it can’t decide which choice is strategically right unless you, the marketer, have defined the criteria.

This is where teams often confuse productivity with progress. Producing more options feels like movement. But if the decision criteria are weak, the team might not be moving forward. It may simply be moving sideways faster.

Kath Pay

Winner of the 2021 ANA/EEC Email Marketers Thought Leader of the Year, and an industry veteran of 26 years, Kath is the author of the best-selling & award-winning book, Holistic Email Marketing, and is a sought-after international keynote speaker, blogger, expert contributor, and trainer.