7 in 10 Marketers Are Drowning in AI Garbage
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI-Ready CMO
Econsultancy published the seventh edition of their Future of Marketing report (pdf), surveying over 1,400 people in marketing and CX. I want to talk about one finding in particular that most of us can relate to.
7 out of 10 marketers say they’ve received “workslop” from colleagues.
The term was coined late last year by researchers at BetterUp Labs and Stanford. It means AI-generated work that looks like it took effort but doesn’t move anything forward. The strategy deck reads like a ChatGPT default. The customer email is technically correct, but feels hollow. The campaign brief that hits every buzzword and says nothing. 27% of marketers report receiving this stuff regularly — not once or twice, but as a pattern. It damages trust within teams, forces rework, and turns AI’s promised productivity gains into a net negative.
If you manage a sales team, a support operation, or a creative department, chances are there is “workslop” in your inbox right now.
The cause isn’t hard to find: companies bought the tools and skipped the training. Only 20% of marketers say their organization’s skills development meets current needs and can adapt as new skills emerge. Twenty percent. And yet the single biggest differentiator between market leaders and followers this year wasn’t budget or tech stack or choice of AI model. It was an investment in people and skills.
The gaps are specific: 44% of organizations lack practical AI implementation skills (starting with basic prompting), 43% can’t integrate AI into existing workflows, and 37% don’t have enough technical understanding of how these tools work. This is all foundational stuff. None of it is cutting-edge.
This Friday (morning US, evening Asia), we are going live with the first episode of Teamless, our new series on agentic workflows for marketers. In about 25 minutes, we’ll demonstrate how to point Claude Cowork at a messy folder of competitor data and walk away with a proper campaign. All this without writing a single line of code or, really, typing much.
Market leaders in the report aren’t using different tools than everyone else — same vendor pool, same platforms. They’re almost twice as likely to report positive consumer responses to their GenAI integrations, and more than twice as likely to say those integrations exceeded expectations. The difference is that they paired deployment with structured upskilling and set explicit quality standards for AI-assisted output.
That last part is worth repeating: explicit quality standards. Telling your team “use AI” without defining what acceptable AI-assisted work looks like is how you get workslop. Set the bar (yes, this means saying out loud that a raw ChatGPT dump is not a deliverable), invest in practical training on prompting and workflow integration, and connect it to business goals. Not a Slack channel with prompt tips, please. Ongoing capability building, same as you’d do for any other core skill.
We keep saying AI skills are management skills. Now there’s a 1,400-person dataset backing it up. Teach your people how to use the tools, or watch them generate workslop at scale.
— Torsten and Peter
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