Client work
AI sped up the draft. Approval did not.
Survey of 333 enterprise marketing teams
What happened
Knak surveyed 333 enterprise marketing teams and found that 85% of them missed at least one launch date last year. The interesting part is not the number, it is the reason: asked what held the work up, teams pointed at approvals, production and coordination. Running out of ideas came nowhere near the top.
That matters more this year than it did two years ago. AI has taken a large bite out of exactly the part that was never the problem. Drafting got faster. Nothing else in the chain moved, so the queue formed somewhere less visible.
What got faster
AI sped up first drafts, variants, resizes, subject lines and alt text. It did not shorten approvals, legal sign-off, handovers, feedback rounds or scheduling.
What did not
What did not: Approvals, legal sign off, asset handovers, feedback rounds, scheduling. Anything that needs a second person to stop what they are doing and look.
Why it matters here
Large teams absorb a duplicate approval step, because someone there is partly paid to chase it. A ten person agency has no such person. The same step lands on the account lead, who is also running two other campaigns that week.
That is why the small agency version of this looks different. It is rarely a missing tool. It is one handoff that exists because it always has, and nobody has had a quiet hour to ask whether it still needs to.
Do this by Friday
The account lead maps one campaign's approvals and removes one duplicate handoff. About an hour, once, and it is easier on a campaign that has already shipped.
01
Map one campaign's approvals end to end: every point where the work stopped and waited.
02
Find the handoff that happens twice, at draft and again at final.
03
Remove one of them and say so out loud, or it is back within a month.
04
Put the new path in the project template, in writing.
Try it now
Here is the approval path for our last campaign, step by step. Point out any step where the same thing is checked twice, and tell me which one is safest to drop.
Also in that Monday’s email
Worth watching: Meta put research and decks inside one tool.
Safe to ignore: predictive targeting did not arrive with proof.
Run it properly
The Client Report Playbook
The full job, stage by stage, if this week’s steps open a bigger conversation.
Members get every briefing four weeks earlier.
They had this one while there was still time to act on it. In AI, a month is a long time: this week’s briefing is already with them.
