AI in Marketing: The Hidden Cost of Faster Content

AI is everywhere. Anyone can use it, and almost everyone is using it.

Teams that once struggled to keep up can now create content faster than ever.  And that speed seems like progress, but engagement is dropping fast. 

People are seeing more and more AI-assisted content. It’s becoming harder to tell what’s carefully created and what’s machine-generated. Eventually, people stop engaging and keep scrolling.

When engagement goes down, the pressure to perform goes up. If we’re creating more than ever, why isn’t it working? Because most companies are still using the same processes they used before AI. Content still has to be reviewed, edited, approved, and shared. And those steps have not changed very much. 

Inside companies, current processes create tension.

Leaders see more work being produced in less time and assume AI is delivering on its promise. 

Employees experience something different. They report more revisions, more back-and-forth conversations, and more doubt about whether the message is factually correct, on brand, and safe to publish.

This is the hidden cost of faster content.

So, what happens? Some teams slow things down. They add extra reviews and approvals. The speed gained from AI gets lost in long feedback cycles.

Others move faster. They rely more on AI output and spend less time refining or questioning it. The content goes out quickly, but when everyone pulls from the same AI systems, it all starts to sound identical, and your brand loses its voice.

AI is not the problem. The challenge is making sure the way we work with AI can keep up with the new speed of creation.

To understand what this shift looks like inside organizations, we surveyed close to 400 full-time professionals in brand, social media, communications, marketing, and design. We compared this year’s results to a similar survey we ran in 2023 to see how things have changed.

Download “AI in Marketing: The Hidden Cost of Faster Content” to see what we found.