Is your AI really working? Why productivity isn’t the same as progress

Jamie Garverick is Chief Revenue Officer at Typeface, a marketing orchestration engine for the world's leading brands and a sponsor of Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference. 

One question I hear repeatedly from Fortune 500 executives is: “If AI is making our teams more productive, why doesn’t the business feel any faster?”

What’s interesting is that very few of those conversations are about whether AI works anymore. They’re about how to operationalize it across an organization.

I see a similar pattern playing out across industries. Many organizations have invested heavily in AI to accelerate content creation, for example, yet campaign timelines continue to lengthen because the underlying operating model remains unchanged.

AI has dramatically improved productivity by automating repetitive work and accelerating content creation. Teams are producing more work in less time. But these activities were never really the limiting factor. Content creation was never the slow part of delivering campaigns.

The real delay occurs after the content is created due to broken workflows. Approvals, cross-functional handoffs, compliance reviews, and vendor coordination combine to slow the process of delivering the end product. As AI increases the volume of work entering the pipeline, organizations often struggle to move that work efficiently to completion. The result is a faster front end feeding an increasingly congested pipeline, slowing anything coming out the back end.

The findings of the Typeface Signal Report: The AI Speed Paradox clearly illustrate the scale of the challenge. Ninety-two percent of marketing leaders report that........

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