For the past two years, marketing leaders have been asking the same questions. Which AI platform should we invest in? Which tools should we standardise on? Which workflows should we automate? How do we get our teams using AI faster?
They’re all reasonable questions, but they’re also the wrong ones. The biggest barrier to AI transformation isn’t technology. It’s that too many organisations are trying to bolt AI onto marketing operating models that were designed for a completely different era.
Adding AI to an unchanged marketing function doesn’t create digital transformation. It simply accelerates whatever already exists. If your teams are siloed, they’ll become siloed faster. If approvals are slow, AI won’t fix them. If decision-making lacks clarity, AI simply allows poor decisions to happen more quickly. Technology can improve efficiency, but it can’t fix an operating model that no longer works.
This is why so many marketers are struggling to move beyond pilots and experimentation. The technology isn’t failing them. Their marketing operating model is.
I’ve always found the relationship with change fascinating. When I was a child, there was no greater thrill than rearranging my bedroom. I’d move the bed under the window, shift my Bon Jovi poster to another wall and somehow convince myself I had an entirely new room. Change felt exciting because there was nothing to lose.
As adults, our relationship with change is very different. We crave certainty because certainty feels safe. Organisations are no different. We instinctively try to preserve the structures, processes and ways of working that made us successful in the past, even when the environment around us has fundamentally changed.
That’s exactly what’s happening with AI in marketing. Most brands and marketers are treating AI as just another technology implementation. They compare models, test tools, build business cases and launch pilot programs. All of that matters, but it’s only scratching the surface of what we need to do. The real transformation won’t happen in the technology stack. It will happen in the way the marketing function works.
We need to reimagine almost every aspect of marketing – how we make decisions, move work across teams, how agencies and in-house teams collaborate, and ask ourselves where human
judgement creates the most value, which work should be automated, and which work should never be.
Those aren’t technology decisions, they are marketing leadership decisions.
For decades, marketing operating models were built around scarcity. Creative execution was expensive, production took time, specialist skills sat in specialist teams and our processes evolved to manage that complexity. Creative execution is no longer the constraint it once was. Ideas can move from concept to execution in hours rather than weeks. Production is becoming faster, cheaper and increasingly automated. Yet many marketers are still operating with outdated structures, approval processes and workflows designed for a world where execution was the bottleneck.
It’s no wonder so many AI initiatives struggle to deliver meaningful change. You can’t redesign the future of marketing by preserving the assumptions of the past. This means the conversation has to move beyond technology. The competitive advantage won’t come from having access to AI because, very soon, every marketer, brand and organisation will have access to AI. It will come from redesigning marketing to take advantage of what AI makes possible.
That means our industry must challenge long-held assumptions about roles and responsibilities. It means redesigning workflows rather than simply automating existing ones. It means giving teams the confidence to work differently instead of expecting technology alone to drive behavioural change. Most importantly, it means recognising that AI doesn’t reduce the importance of human judgement, it elevates it.
The marketers and brands making the greatest progress with AI aren’t necessarily those investing the most in technology. They’re the ones willing to reimagine how their marketing operates from the ground up. They understand that transformation isn’t measured by how many AI tools have been deployed or how many use cases have been identified. It’s measured by whether the organisation actually works differently and delivers better outcomes – faster, more efficiently, more comprehensively and more cost-effectively.
The marketers and brands that succeed will be those prepared to redesign how marketing creates value in an AI-enabled world. Because the future of marketing won’t be shaped by the organisations that simply adopt AI, it will belong to those prepared to fundamentally rethink how marketing works.
Alison McKinnon is Managing Director of CM.OSX, part of the BRX Group.
