Why you’re (probably) doing marketing AI wrong – and how to fix it.

How to speed up your marketing workflow with AI Agents

Billions of dollars are flowing into marketing AI as everyone scrambles to save costs and increase velocity.  Meanwhile the average CMO still spends 18 hours per week in meetings, six of which are completely wasted and 95% of the enterprises automating with AI see zero productivity gains. When it comes to marketing, the reason is that most marketers are aiming AI at the wrong things.

The bottleneck isn’t where you think

Most marketing automation tools are being deployed in the execution phase for things like instant video production or authoring 10,000 headline options. This makes sense on the surface because execution is where 60-80% of budgets are spent. However, ~75% of that spend is in working dollars which is already deeply optimized by Google et al, and crucially execution actually represents a minority of the time spent.

When you take into account all the swirl that happens before a project becomes official, decision-making likely consumes 70-85% of the time between the identification of a need and the deployment of a marketing asset.

As such, to get faster you should focus on streamlining the 85% of time focused on decision making.  What’s more, that time is typically spent inside your organization meaning you have control over it.  What follows is a playbook to pull time and money out of your marketing workflow.

Step 1 – Time diagnostic

The first step is to figure out where your time is actually spent if you don’t already know (more common than you might think)

Run a time-study on your next three projects from the point where the need is first identified to final delivery to determine how much duration and how many FTE hours are spent throughout the process.  The goal here is to understand where the big chunks of time are spent, not to get three decimals of precision. Track both “hard approvals” (budget sign-offs, legal reviews, brand compliance) and “soft approvals” (those unofficial check-ins where someone needs to weigh in before you proceed) in each step. It’s okay if you can’t track all the time before a project becomes official.  Just know that your results will be an under-estimate.

You’ll likely discover that the longest single delays come from hard approvals (e.g. waiting for budget approval), but the longest cumulative delays come from soft approvals. 

Step 2 – Hard approval validation agents

Identify the hard-approval that has the highest rate of rejection and thus wasted time. This is likely your biggest single time constraint and the source of the most anxiety and frustration among your team.  

Take the documented criteria for this approval step as well as the corpus of historical approvals and rejections (particularly any feedback or comments offered) and build an AI validation agent with it using your enterprise AI Agent workflow or a dedicated tool like 99Ravens

Teams can use the agent to gauge how likely their project is to get approved and receive advice on how to improve it before submitting to the existing approval. When rolling it out, make it optional at first so teams can choose to validate with the AI before submitting to your existing formal reviews. This provides a non-threatening and low risk way to drive adoption and tune the agent.  Expand to other hard approvals with high rejection rates as you see fit.  You can even replace some of the manual approvals with the AI agents when you have sufficient confidence in the results.

Step 3 – Scaling corporate perspectives 

Now that you’ve got some wins with your hard approvals, it’s time to repeat the process, this time building AI agents for your corporate perspectives. Entity knowledge like your corporate strategy, competitive positioning and brand philosophy are great places to start. Use the documentation and supplement with interviews of the authors to build the AI Agents and follow the same deployment process as step 1.

Step 4 – Elevating soft approvals by scaling personal perspectives

Now that you’ve established a reliable workflow for building and scaling agents to drive usage, you’re ready to tackle the biggest cause of delays and costs: soft approvals.

Soft approvals stem from a lack of trust that leaders’ perspectives are understood, slowing down low-trust teams. The most common place they crop up is in preparation for a hard approval so your work in step 1 should already have caused substantial reductions. The remaining soft approvals likely focus on accessing specific perspectives for which we will now build AI agents that your teams can access on-demand. 

Start with senior leaders like the CMO or valuable but hard to access expertise like functional specialists and focus on a specific workflow or deliverable.  Don’t try to build a virtual CMO (you’ll fail) but instead encapsulate your CMOs thinking on something like how to fit new products into your larger brand. There is less likely to be documentation for these perspectives so use an AI agent workflow with integrated interview and research capabilities like 99Ravens to elicit their opinions and build their agents.

Pilot these agents with teams that are either under tight timelines, are resource constrained or have critical dependencies on the leaders that defined the agents.  Watch for the number of soft approvals to fall and for their nature to go from compliance to elevation to expansion.

What changes when you can execute at speed?

When strategic alignment happens asynchronously as teams need it instead of in meetings, everything accelerates and you get:

• Faster Market Response: React to opportunities in hours, not weeks, because teams don’t need to coordinate calendars to access strategic guidance.
• Higher Quality Thinking: Consistent application of your best practices across all decisions, regardless of who’s available for a meeting.
• Scalable Expertise: Senior executives can scale new thinking to the entire organization instantly and junior team members can apply senior-level frameworks without senior-level salaries or schedule constraints.
• Reduced Meeting Tax: Eliminate the coordination overhead that kills momentum in fast-moving markets.

Your Implementation Blueprint

The transformation doesn’t happen overnight, but you can begin immediately.

• This Week: Map one critical decision process from end to end. Identify which approvals could be systematized.
• Next Month: Implement your first automated compliance check for the approval with the highest rejection rate.
• This Quarter: Begin capturing and encoding the strategic thinking patterns your best leaders use.

If you have an enterprise AI Agent solution then approach that team with your plan.  If you don’t or if that solution is not marketing focused then 99Ravens is here to help.

Ready to analyze your specific workflow bottlenecks and identify where strategic automation could accelerate your team? Contact 99Ravens to map your marketing department’s strategic acceleration opportunities and see how decision-making transforms when expertise becomes software.