Knak surveyed more than 300 enterprise marketing leaders for its new report, Marketing Production in the Age of AI, and found a gap that cuts against the industry’s own AI narrative: 70% of teams have deployed AI somewhere in their production workflow, yet 85% still missed at least one planned campaign launch date in the past year, and 10% missed more than five. AI adoption and delivery reliability are moving in opposite directions.
The reason is process, not creative quality. Knak’s data shows 60% of teams still need four or more people to produce a single email, 69% require two to three revision rounds before anything ships, and approvals and sign-off were the top cause of missed deadlines at 47%, ahead of design work itself at 38%. AI sped up drafting, but drafting was never the bottleneck: routing a finished asset through people, tools, and sign-offs is, and that part of the workflow hasn’t changed. Marketers are also still measuring the wrong thing: teams are 68% more likely to track click-through rate than revenue or pipeline influence, so even when AI saves time, the organization often can’t prove it moved a number a CFO cares about.
The original insight in Knak’s data is what it implies about where the next investment should go. Buying another AI drafting tool will not fix an 85% miss rate if the miss is happening in the four-person approval chain downstream of the draft, and CMOs benchmarking “AI maturity” by tool adoption alone are measuring the wrong input. The better diagnostic is cycle time from approved copy to live send, tracked as its own metric, since that is the stage Knak’s data says is actually broken. As AI’s marketing cost keeps rising largely untracked, teams that can point to a shrinking approval-to-launch window will have a much easier time justifying further AI spend than teams that can only point to more AI-generated drafts, a distinction the broader measurement gap across marketing makes even more urgent to close.
Source: Knak (PR Newswire)
