• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, Yesterday

Marketing teams embraced AI to speed things up. But 85% missed a campaign launch date last year, and they are bogged down by details, judging by a new study from Knak, titled “Marketing Production In The Age of AI.”

Of those polled, 82% spend at least half of their time on production. The biggest hold-ups are approvals & sign-offs (47%), design and creative production (38%) and coordinating across teams (36%). 

"Marketers were told AI would hand them back time for strategy,” says Jennifer Delevante, chief marketing officer at Knak. “Our data says it hasn't happened yet.”

"It's not a talent problem or a creativity problem," Delevante adds. "It's the production layer — the gap between a good idea and a launched campaign. Until that gets fixed, teams will keep buying tools that get them to a draft and leave them stuck before launch."

How long does an email blast take? For 36%, a full day is needed to send an email from brief to send. Moreover, 60% say at least four people are involved in the process. And 69% go through two or three rounds of revisions prior to approval.

Some teams can get the job done in four hours, but these tend to have 2-3 people involved in email production and 16-30 employees on the marketing team.

In addition, they are intermediate AI adopters who are using AI deliberately, not as an experiment. Their tech stacks include Salesforce Marketing Cloud as their automation platform, ChatGPT for content. And half say approvals go through email, Slack or Teams.

There is no question marketers are using AI: 70% say AI is embedded in marketing workflows, but has not yet fully taken over. These workflows include:

• Generating first drafts of email and landing page copy — 64%
• Generating or editing images — 56%
• Analyzing performance data and suggesting optimizations — 56%
• Writing subject line variants — 48%

Meanwhile, marketers use the following metrics to gauge email or landing page performance:

• Click-through rate — 69%
• Conversion rate — 58%
• Open rate — 47%
• Revenue/pipeline — 41%
• Bounce rate — 35%
• Unsubscribe rate — 31%
• Deliverability — 29%
• A/B test win rate — 25%
• No formal tracking — 3%

On behalf of Knak, Datlalily via Centiment surveyed 333 marketing decision-makers in the US, UK, Canada along with Knak customers between April 20-May, 18, 2026.