# AI Makes Yesterday's Way of Working Hard to Defend

By Dan Seyer, Founder, Build Marketing · Published 2026-10-23

> A line from an old colleague has been stuck in my head for weeks. This is about why, and what I think leaders should do about it.

## Why does AI make yesterday's way of working hard to defend?

Most processes were designed around what people's time cost: research once a quarter, reports that look backward, ideas waiting in someone's queue. AI has cut that cost, but most processes haven't changed with it. Once you get something done in an afternoon that used to take weeks of handoffs, the old way is hard to justify. The test is simple: after you count review time, mistakes, cost and risk, is the result better? If it is, the old way needs a real reason to stay.

## AI Summary

Jeremy Fong, VP of Product at OPSWAT, put it this way: "AI doesn't just speed up the work. It makes the old way indefensible." He's right. Most of the ways companies work were built around what people's time used to cost. AI has made that time much cheaper, but the processes haven't caught up. Early indicators of engagement with AI, like who is actually using the tools, are a good first sign. The real payoff comes when you change the work itself. Here's where I'd start: pick one workflow your team runs every week, rebuild it with AI, measure it honestly, and then share it with the rest of the team.

## Jeremy

Jeremy Fong and I have worked together at three companies: media.net, Ribbit and Jibe. BT bought Ribbit in 2008 (here's [BT's side of that story](https://www.buildmarketing.ai/video-ted-griggs-jp-rangaswami)), and Google bought Jibe in 2015 (here's [the hackathon we ran](https://www.buildmarketing.ai/video-jibe-mobile-hackathon) along the way, where Jeremy was a judge on the panel).

Jeremy is an incredible leader in the C-suite. He was great from day one, and he's only gotten better. What I've always noticed is how he works. He spots the opportunity before most people do, then puts a process and a lot of brainpower behind it. And he's amazing with people. Being smart and organized is one thing. Getting a team to actually want to change how they work is another, and Jeremy does both. He doesn't fall in love with the idea, and he doesn't keep a process around just because it's always been there.

So when Jeremy put this into words, I wrote it down:

**"AI doesn't just speed up the work. It makes the old way indefensible."**

## It Starts With Speed

I've felt this in my own work. At first AI just made me faster. Research took an hour instead of a day. First drafts stopped being painful. An idea I mentioned in a meeting could be a working prototype before the meeting ended.

Then I started asking annoying questions. Why does this need four people to touch it? Why are we pulling the same numbers every Monday? Why does testing a small idea need a budget, a brief and a slot in someone's queue?

Usually there's no good answer. The process made sense once, and nobody went back to check.

Some people haven't had that moment yet. In [Gallup's May 2026 survey](https://www.gallup.com/workplace/712736/organizational-adoption-jumps-six-points.aspx) of more than 22,000 U.S. workers, 52 percent said they use AI in their role. But only 30 percent use it a few times a week or more, and just 15 percent use it every day. Fewer than half (47 percent) said their organization has brought in AI tools at all, and one in five didn't know.

And even when people have a tool, the question is whether it's the right tool for the work they actually do. My sense is that a lot of people still aren't moving outside the $20-a-month box: one chat subscription, used for drafts and quick questions, and not connected to anything else. Some won't even buy that themselves. They use whatever their organization provides, and a lot of organizations are being conservative. That means they can't learn what the better tools can do. If you work in marketing, or really any profession, you need to be on all the AI tools, not just one, and understand which one is good, better and best for each job.

So for many teams, the old way hasn't been tested yet.

## Built for What Work Used to Cost

Most companies built their processes around what people's time cost. Research happens once a quarter because someone has to do it. Reports look backward because pulling the data takes days. Good ideas wait because the people who could build them are busy.

None of that was wrong when it was set up. But when the cost changes and the process doesn't, a sensible decision turns into an expensive habit.

## Wire the Steps Together

Take a typical campaign. One person looks at last quarter's results. Someone else researches the audience. A third person writes the brief. Then production, then distribution, and weeks later someone finally looks at how it did. Every step is a handoff, and every handoff is a wait.

You can use AI to speed up each of those steps, and you'll get something out of it. The bigger win is wiring them together, so what you learn from the market goes straight into the next round instead of into a slide deck.

![The same campaign two ways. Yesterday's way: six steps in a line, from reviewing performance to analyzing weeks later, with a handoff and a wait between each. Connected with AI: a loop where performance informs research, research shapes creation, and market response guides the next round.](https://www.buildmarketing.ai/images/yesterdays-way-of-working-connected-loop.svg)

I want to be careful here, because I've also seen this go wrong. Faster isn't automatically better. A team can crank out three times the content and learn nothing. You can automate a report nobody reads. You can get polished work that someone then spends a day fixing.

So the test I use is simple. After you count the review time, the mistakes, the cost and the risk, is the result better? If it is, the old way needs a pretty good reason to stick around.

## Licenses Are Only the Start

Licenses count. They're an early measure of engagement, and a good way to gauge AI maturity at the start. And we are surely at the start. Later, outcomes are how we'll measure things. But while we're just getting started and want to encourage creativity and exploration, we may need to reward the opposite: people trying things, even when there's no outcome to show yet. Imagine if your CFO said, "We want you to spend more on AI. You aren't spending enough on AI."

Many people still don't have access to the tools at all, and plenty of people who do have access don't use them. The machines are moving much faster than the humans. So knowing who has a seat, and who actually opens it, tells you where your team really is.

Here's an idea that's a little outside the box. Nobody measures AI this way yet, but you could. Think about how you'd judge a sales team's customer engagement. One of the first places you'd look is their expense reports: who's taking customers to lunch, who's getting on planes, who's actually out building relationships. AI works the same way. Start with the technical seat costs to see whether your teams are even trying to engage with AI. Then look at the usage logs, or at token consumption, to see who's really using it. Set aside the agent jobs, which consume the bulk of the tokens, so you're seeing what people are doing themselves.

In [My CFO Cut My Marketing Budget and Said: Use AI](https://www.buildmarketing.ai/my-cfo-cut-my-marketing-budget), I argued that AI spend is one of the best ways to see how mature a marketing team is. Seats are where that starts. The next signals are whether people actually use those seats, whether there's API spend across several tools, and whether the tools are connected to real workflows.

Alongside the spend, I'd ask one more question: what do we do better today, every week, because we have AI? If nobody can name a specific workflow and a specific result, the licenses haven't paid off yet.

The numbers back this up. In [McKinsey's State of AI survey](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai) from August 2026, nearly nine in ten companies say they use AI regularly, but only 37 percent see any impact on profit, about the same as a year ago. McKinsey calls 6 percent of companies high performers, and what stands out is that nearly three quarters of them have fundamentally redesigned workflows because of AI. Among everyone else, it's about one in four.

![McKinsey State of AI, August 2026: about 90 percent of companies use AI regularly, 37 percent see any impact on profit, and 6 percent are high performers. Nearly three quarters of high performers have redesigned workflows because of AI, compared with about one in four of everyone else.](https://www.buildmarketing.ai/images/yesterdays-way-of-working-mckinsey-stats.svg)

## Not Every Approval Is Friction

Some approvals are there for good reasons. They protect customers, money and sensitive data, and they should stay. Others are there because nobody ever questioned them. AI gives you a reason to look at both. Keep the ones that matter, drop the ones that don't, and be clear about who owns the result either way.

## Who Makes the Old Way Indefensible

It usually isn't the most senior person in the room. At Cannes Lions this year, the CMOs of Google, OpenAI and JPMorganChase talked about the marketers they're betting on, and called them [makers and builders](https://www.buildmarketing.ai/makers-and-builders-who-cmos-are-betting-on). Plenty of them are junior people who got tired of doing something by hand and automated it. JPMorganChase's Carla Hassan made a point I agree with, too: a campaign "is still a process," and if you skip steps to go faster, something eventually breaks.

The people who go furthest are what I call [Marketing Super-Creators](https://www.buildmarketing.ai/blog-rise-of-the-marketing-supercreator), marketers who stop just using AI and start building with it. Honestly, it's what I've watched Jeremy do for years. See the opportunity, put a process and real thinking behind it, bring the people with you, and don't keep the old way just because it's there.

## Where I'd Start

Pick one workflow your team runs every week or every month. Write down what it costs today and where it gets stuck. Rebuild it with AI, run it for a couple of weeks, and count everything, including the time spent checking and fixing.

If it's better, get the rest of the team using it. One person's clever shortcut doesn't help the company until other people can use it too.

If you want help picking the first one, paste this into ChatGPT, Claude or whatever you use. It'll interview you about one workflow and give you a plan to test.

**Prompt: Redesign one workflow with AI** (for your favorite AI tool (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot))

Give this to your favorite AI tool. It maps one recurring process, separates essential controls from accumulated friction, and gives you a redesign and a two-week test plan.

```text
I want to redesign one recurring workflow with AI, and decide honestly whether the new way is better than the old one. Interview me one question at a time, and wait for my answer before asking the next. Ask follow-up questions when my answers are vague.

1. Pick the workflow: Ask what recurring processes my team runs (weekly, monthly or per campaign). Help me choose one that is frequent, time-consuming and has a clear outcome.
2. Map today's process: Walk through it step by step. For each step, ask who does it, how long it takes, what it waits on, and what is handed off to whom.
3. Cost and delays: Estimate the hours, the elapsed time from start to finish, and where the longest waits happen.
4. Controls vs. friction: For every approval or review, ask what it protects (customers, finances, sensitive information, brand) or whether it exists only because nobody has reconsidered it. Label each one essential control or accumulated friction.
5. Good outcome: Ask what a better result would look like in business terms, not just faster output.

Then give me:
- A one-paragraph summary of the workflow as it runs today, with the total effort and elapsed time.
- A redesigned version that uses AI to connect the steps, so what we learn at the end feeds the next round. Name the tools or data each step needs.
- Which controls to keep, which friction to remove, and who stays accountable for the result.
- A two-week test plan with the measures that matter: time, errors, review effort, cost and the business outcome.
- How to make it repeatable for the rest of the team if the test works.

Be direct. If the redesign doesn't beat the old way once review and correction are counted, say so.
```

More prompts: [Prompt Library](https://www.buildmarketing.ai/prompts.md)

## Let the Old Way Go

The way most of us work today was designed for limits that are disappearing. When something better proves itself, let the old way go.

Once you've seen what's possible, the question flips. Nobody has to justify trying the new way anymore. Someone has to explain why the work still happens the old way.

Want help picking the first workflow to redesign? [Get in touch](https://www.buildmarketing.ai/#Get-In-Touch) with Dan Seyer, or [run MachineReady on your website](https://www.buildmarketing.ai/machineready/), a tool we built to show how AI reads your site.

*Sources: Gallup, "Organizational AI Adoption Jumps Six Points," July 2026, survey of 22,573 employed U.S. adults, May 6 to 20, 2026. McKinsey & Company, "The State of AI," August 2026.*