The Future of Marketing Teams Will Be Built on Workflows

Sharon Sciammas
Sep 26
4 min read

AI workflows are the future of marketing teams

When AI first hit the mainstream, it felt like magic. A single prompt could draft a blog post, write an email, or generate an ad in minutes.

For a while, that was enough. Marketing teams everywhere experimented with ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude — each person with their own style, their own tricks, their own endless threads of conversations.

But very quickly, the cracks started to show.

The cracks in the system

If you’ve tried to scale AI inside a team, you’ve probably seen this first-hand:

Knowledge gap. Some people become AI “whisperers,” others never quite figure it out. The results swing wildly depending on who’s behind the keyboard.
Inconsistent outputs. One blog post is sharp, the next is off-brand. Some email campaigns land, others miss the mark completely.
Lost context. ICPs, messaging, competitor research — if it exists, it’s buried in a Notion doc or a forgotten Google Drive folder. The AI never sees it.
Fragility. Models degrade, tools change, prompts stop working. Anthropic recently admitted Claude was degrading for weeks before they patched bugs. What happens to all your “prompt libraries” when the underlying model shifts?
Chaos at scale. One marketer with 200 chats is messy. Ten marketers with thousands of chats? That’s not a workflow, it’s a graveyard.

Prompts gave us speed. But they don’t give us scale.

And without scale, marketing leaders can’t rely on AI.

Why workflows are the new operating system

We have been running workflows for a while.

Here’s the truth: marketing has always been about workflows.

You don’t just “write a blog post.” You start with goals, ICPs, positioning, messaging, competitor analysis, distribution strategy. Then you create the blog.

You don’t just “send an email.” You define the segment, the offer, the tone, the sequence, the CTA.

Marketing is systems.

So why should AI be different?

AI workflows (or playbooks) are simply the codified, automated version of what good marketers already do. They turn messy, scattered prompting into structured, repeatable processes.

Instead of “ask GPT for an SEO strategy,” a workflow runs the proper steps:

Pull competitive data.
Map ICP pain points.
Generate clusters of keywords.
Build a content plan.
Produce optimized briefs.

It’s not magic. It’s discipline — automated.

What it looks like in practice

We learned this the hard way.

At one point, we were drowning in chaos:

Last-minute requests for blog posts (sometimes at midnight).
Product launches with no time for proper research.
PR drafts that took half a day.
Sales asking for positioning docs “yesterday.”

Prompts weren’t cutting it.

So we built our first AI workflow for market research.

It fed in ICP, positioning, and product context. Agents pulled live data from multiple sources. The process followed a structured research framework.

In two hours, we had a research report. Two hours instead of two weeks. And at a fraction of the thousands we used to pay consultants.

The results were sharper, more accurate, and more actionable than anything we’d outsourced.

That’s when it clicked: prompts weren’t the future. Workflows were.

The real impact: speed, trust, scale

Here’s what shifted once we moved from prompting to workflows:

Blog posts: from hours → minutes.
PR pieces: from half a day → five minutes.
Market research: from weeks + $$$ → two hours at a fraction of the cost.
Content strategies: from 2–3 weeks → half a day.
Product marketing responses: from hours → minutes.

That’s not just incremental improvement. That’s a new operating model.

Workflows gave us three things prompts never could:

Speed. Campaigns launched in hours, not weeks.
Trust. Outputs were consistent, structured, and review-ready. I no longer had to second-guess every deliverable.
Scale. Ten people could now run marketing as one team, not ten disconnected experiments.

Why this matters for leaders

If you’re running a marketing team, you’re not just chasing speed — you’re chasing consistency, alignment, and trust.

And that’s exactly where prompts break down:

They depend too much on individual skill.
They can’t carry shared context.
They don’t scale across teams.

Leaders see it every day: missed opportunities, inconsistent brand voice, lost time, and burned-out teams who’ve lost faith in AI.

Workflows change the equation. They:

Encode best practices into every process.
Make results repeatable across people.
Reduce dependence on “AI power users.”
Free up time for creativity, strategy, and customer empathy.

The teams that adopt workflows will move 5–10x faster, with higher quality and lower cost. The ones that stick with prompts? They’ll be left behind.

The bigger picture: where this is heading

This isn’t just about saving time on a blog post. It’s about redefining how marketing teams operate.

Think back:

Before CRMs, sales teams lived in spreadsheets and email threads. Chaos.
Before ERPs, operations were scattered across departments. Slow, messy, expensive.

AI in marketing is at that same turning point.

Right now, we’re in the “spreadsheets and email threads” phase — messy prompting, endless chats, no centralization.

But the future is clear: AI workflows will become the operating system of marketing teams.

In 1–3 years, nobody will run serious marketing just through chat prompts. It’ll be playbooks, workflows, and systems — with humans guiding, reviewing, and creating the final spark.