You bought AI to move faster. You're still late.
85% of teams missed a launch last year. The bottleneck isn't the writing.
Happy Tuesday y’all!
Count the people who touch one email before it goes out. Four? Five? Now count the revision rounds. This is the part of your job no deck has ever had a slide for.
Knak surveyed enterprise marketing teams, including ones running marketing for Google, Amazon, Uber and Meta, and found that 85% missed at least one launch date in the past year. Not from bad strategy or weak creative. From everything that happens after the idea is approved: the handoffs, the sign-offs, the rebuilds.
Here’s the part that should sting. Seventy percent of them have AI in production. Eighty-eight percent say the output still needs moderate to substantial human editing before it can ship. AI got everyone to a faster first draft and then dropped them at the exact same door: approvals.
The single biggest cause of missed launches wasn’t design or copy. It was getting sign-off, at 47%.
So the tool sped up the one part that was already fast. The slow part, the human queue in the middle, is untouched. You can feel productive all day and still ship on Thursday what was ready Monday.
— Peter & Torsten
Numbers matter
$262 billion. — What AI agents influenced in spending during the 2025 holiday season, by Salesforce’s own data. Agents aren’t a demo you’ll evaluate next year.
They already moved a quarter-trillion dollars while your team was arguing about a subject line.
Daily prompt
Here is our email production process from approved brief to live send: [paste the steps and who owns each]. Act as a marketing ops lead. Find every handoff and approval gate. Flag the three most likely to cause a missed launch date, tell me why each is slow, and propose one change per gate that removes a step without removing a check we actually need.
Use this before you ask for headcount or a new tool. Nine times out of ten, the missed launch isn’t a people problem or a software problem. It’s two redundant approvals nobody remembers adding. Run this, and walk into the budget meeting with the map instead of the complaint.
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CMO corner
You can’t scale what you haven’t defined.
Everyone wants AI to give them throughput. Throughput comes from a defined system, and most “processes” are just habits three people happen to share. Define the sign-off path on paper first. Then automate it. Automating a mess only gets you a faster mess.
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Tool upgrade
If the bottleneck is coordination, not writing, point automation at the queue. Three tools for that, depending on how technical you want to get:
n8n — best if you’ve got a technical person and want the whole workflow self-hosted on your own box. Try n8n here →
Lindy — best for an agent that actually chases the approval and updates the record, instead of drafting more copy nobody was waiting on. Try Lindy here →
Reclaim — best for defending the focus time that the approval queue quietly eats every week. Try Reclaim here →
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Learn this
The honest version of “does any of this pay off.”
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That’s it for today!
See you next time,
— Peter & Torsten
