there is something wrong with the "AI productivity" conversation
Disclaimer: i work at twilio. views here are my own.
Every AI ROI conversation in marketing (and I am sure pretty much all of GTM) right now sounds roughly the same - “we used to spend eight hours on this report, now it takes two”, “we used to produce four content variants, now we produce forty”, “we used to take three days to build a campaign brief, now it’s three hours”.
These are real numbers and certainly represent real value, but they are also almost entirely the wrong thing to be measuring.
Time saved on existing tasks is the floor of what AI makes possible in marketing, not the ceiling. The teams treating it as the ceiling are optimizing themselves into a comfortable version of the same limitations they’ve always had.
When you apply AI to an existing task, you implicitly accept that the task was the right one to begin with - that the workflow was correctly designed and that the output was the right output and the only question was how fast you could produce it.
But, most marketing workflows were not correctly designed.
They were designed around constraints - of time, of headcount, of data access, of technical capacity - that shaped what was even considered possible. You didn’t build a process to analyze every support ticket for product marketing signals because no team could do that at scale. You didn’t build a process to research every target account before outreach because the math didn’t work. You didn’t build a feedback loop between win-loss data and campaign messaging because nobody had the bandwidth to close that loop weekly.
Those weren’t strategic choices but rather capacity choices that hardened into process.
AI doesn’t just speed up what you were already doing but makes previously impossible tasks viable. The teams that understand this aren’t asking “how do we do our current work faster.”, but instead “what work could we now do that we couldn’t before” - and then rebuilding their function around the answer.
The marketing teams that are genuinely ahead right now share one characteristic: they’ve identified at least one capability they now have that simply did not exist for them twelve months ago. This isn’t a faster version of something old but a new thing entirely.
Signal coverage at a scale that wasn’t workable before - e.g. monitoring buying intent across hundreds of accounts and routing it in real time. Content personalization that wasn’t economically viable - tailored by industry, role, buying stage, and account history without a dedicated writing team. Research depth that wasn’t feasible - competitive and account intelligence synthesized before every meaningful sales interaction, not just the big ones.
They are new capabilities, not just efficiency gains, and they require not just new tools but new process logic - designed around what AI can actually do rather than retrofitted onto what humans were already doing
The reason most teams stay stuck in efficiency framing is that efficiency is easy to measure and capability expansion is not. Hours saved has a number - “we can now do something we fundamentally couldn’t before” doesn’t fit neatly into a productivity dashboard (which your CXOs care about a lot ;) )
But that’s the metric that will actually separate the teams that look transformed in three years from the ones that just look faster. Not how much time they saved on existing tasks but what new tasks they built their function around.
Most teams are optimizing for the former - i hope you are not :)