Developing
Opinion based on anecdotes; no benchmarks, surveys or controlled results are provided.
In 60 seconds
- The author says AI made content production cheap, so "the constraint moved upstream" to intake, decisions, reviews and handoffs.
- Adding tools to unchanged processes adds friction rather than speed.
- Leaders should focus on intake and prioritisation, limiting work in progress, defining human versus AI roles and fast feedback loops.
- A practical start is to map one workflow end to end and measure the wait time between steps.
Impact Layer
- What changed
- A practitioner reframes marketing operations as workflow design.
- Why it matters
- If approvals and handoffs are the bottleneck, faster content tools will not increase output.
- Who is affected
- Marketing operations leaders and team managers.
- Martech stack area
- Marketing Automation, Content
- Stack impact
- Map one recurring workflow, such as a campaign brief to launch, and measure how long work waits between steps.
- Business impact
- Low A contributed opinion piece on MarTech (owned by Semrush), based on the author's consulting with teams of two to 200 people; no benchmarks. Tools such as Claude and Canva AI are mentioned as examples, not evaluated.
- Related technologies
- What to watch
- Your own measured wait times.
Stacey Ackerman, an independent consultant and MarTech contributor, argues in a column published October 19, 2026 that the next great marketing leaders will design how work gets done.
The argument
- AI made content production cheap, so the bottleneck moved to intake, decisions, reviews and handoffs: “the constraint moved upstream”.
- Adding tools to unchanged processes adds friction rather than speed.
- Leaders should focus on four areas: intake and prioritisation, limiting work in progress, defining human versus AI roles and fast feedback loops.
- A practical starting point is to map one workflow end to end and measure wait time between steps.
Examples
A deadline slipped three weeks because a brief sat in an approval queue; before AI, copywriting and design took “weeks (and sometimes months)”; and one client’s platform rollout showed patchy usage and workarounds six months later.
Caveats
It is an opinion piece based on anecdotes, with no benchmarks, surveys or controlled results.
Our read
Measuring wait time is cheap and tells you whether tools or process are your limit.
Sources
- MarTech: The next great marketing leaders will design how work gets done (opens in a new tab)
Source for the column's argument and caveats.