The AI revolution is well underway. For marketing teams, AI-powered content can be game-changing. Although tech evolves at breakneck speed, leading to faster creation, the Creation Operating Models behind campaign creation remain stuck in the past. It’s that very disconnect that’s costing brands time, talent, and trust.
At the 2025 Gartner Marketing Symposium, Stensul Founder & CEO Noah Dinkin debuted a keynote that cut through the noise: AI alone isn’t the key to unlock campaign success. The true opportunity lies in rethinking the Creation Operating Model that governs how marketing work gets done—and reimagining it for the modern AI-era to unlock speed, scale, and safety.
The great AI paradox in marketing
According to Gartner, 77% of marketers are experimenting with generative AI to accelerate content production. But for many, those efforts are falling short of expectations:
- 44% report limited or no measurable benefits
- 27% of CMOs have opted not to invest in GenAI at all
Why the hesitation? It all comes down to risk.
In highly regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and pharma—or even in global consumer brands with tight brand controls—the margin for AI error is razor-thin.
Without the right governance in place, even a single AI-generated misstep can lead to compliance issues, reputational damage, or worse.
As one Gartner-cited marketing leader put it: “The greatest risk is that AI will be used improperly and result in unethical outcomes.”
That fear isn’t unfounded, but it’s also avoidable.
The real bottleneck: outdated Creation Operating Models
As easy as it would be to just blame all these fears and problems on AI, that’s not the only culprit. One of the biggest problems marketing teams face today is the brittle, fragmented way campaigns are built.
Whether your team operates in a traditional Design-to-Code setup, a semi-automated Brief-to-Template workflow, or a highly Distributed network of contributors and approvers, the result is the same:
- 2–4 week campaign timelines
- Limited creative flexibility
- High risk of errors and rework
- Specialist bottlenecks that constrain throughput
Each of these Creation Operating Models is over-optimized for the past when email production meant manually slicing HTML and campaign launches were tied to IT timelines.
In the AI era, they no longer work. They lead to wasted resources, slow time to market, lost opportunities for revenue, and decreased customer engagement—to name a few issues.
What’s needed? A new content operating model
To fully realize the promise of AI-led content creation, brands need to rebuild their operating models from the ground up and do so with AI-native capabilities and embedded governance at the core.
One of the biggest challenges today is the fact that AI and specialist tools are all fragmented. AI is being added everywhere. Yet in today’s Creation Operating Models, no one works in the same place. Things are still disconnected.
But before you can possibly hop into a brand new way of working, it’s essential to ground yourself in the realities of your campaign creation process currently.
To do so, we crafted the SPEED Framework as a pragmatic roadmap for transformation.
Take a peek at our proven SPEED Workflow Audit (download PDF) infographic to unblock your workflow today.
S: Scan the Current Workflow
Document who’s involved, where delays happen, and how long handoffs take-from brief to send.
P: Pinpoint Bottlenecks
With that visualized workflow, use 🔴🟡🟢 to flag friction points and expose where work gets stuck.
E: Evaluate the Economic Impact
Calculate hidden costs: lost hours, missed deadlines, and wasted resources.
E: Expose Opportunities for Adding AI
Identify where you can add AI to unlock the most value.
D: Define Guardrails
Rethink governance (the why/what/where/how) to empower the wider team.
Result: AI-powered campaign creation
Once you’ve followed the above framework and laid the foundation for a governance-first Creation Operating Model, only then can you fully unlock campaign creation powered by Al, protected by guardrails, and built to scale. And, only then does reinventing campaign creation become less scary.
This framework shifts the creation model from a series of disconnected steps to a connected, compliant, AI-accelerated system: one where more team members can safely participate and specialists are freed to focus on strategy, not syntax.
Proof in performance: Stensul successes
Two case studies from the symposium illustrate what this looks like in practice:
Company: A large software company
By the numbers:
- 90% faster email production
- 163% increase in qualified leads
- 140% increase in revenue
What they’re saying: “We eliminated the need for emails to be built by coders. Suddenly, we could handle more requests, faster, with better outcomes.”
Company: Cisco
By the numbers:
- 30x faster creation cycles
- 4.5x better campaign performance
What they’re saying: “Stensul gave me independence. I’m no longer reliant on outside services for every email request.”
These aren’t just incremental gains. They represent a structural shift in how marketing teams operate, and what’s possible when process and technology align.
Control the process, influence the outcome
The AI era demands more than automation. It demands intentional architecture: Creation Operating Models that are built for speed and control.
With the right system in place, AI becomes a multiplier, not a minefield. Execution accelerates. Compliance is automated. And your best thinkers get back to doing what they do best: creating powerful, brand-building work.
At Stensul, we believe campaign creation should be as agile as the strategies that fuel it.
Ready to reinvent campaign creation? Let’s talk.
- Sign up to attend our free webinar, From Chaos to Control: Reinventing Campaign Creation in the AI Era with Stensul Founder and CEO Noah Dinkin.
- Next, sign up for your free workflow audit to assess how your team can remove campaign bottlenecks.
