Marketing teams adopted AI to move faster. 85% still missed a campaign launch date last year

A survey of 300+ enterprise marketing leaders finds the bottleneck is production: the work of building, reviewing and shipping emails and landing pages

OTTAWA, ON, July 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- A new report from Knak, the marketing production platform for enterprise teams, quantifies the challenges that lead enterprise marketers to deliver launches late and miss out on strategic work. The Marketing Production in the Age of AI details the problem. It's not strategy or creative missteps but instead everything that happens after the idea is approved: the handoffs, revisions and rebuilds required to turn finished copy into a live email. This is the layer Knak calls marketing production — and the report finds it's quietly consuming enterprise teams, even the ones trusted to run marketing for Google, Amazon, Uber, Meta and OpenAI.

• For more information and to download the full report, visit https://knak.com/state-of-marketing-production/.

Consider what it takes to send one email. At the companies surveyed, 60% involve four or more people, 54% juggle three to five separate tools, and 69% need two to three rounds of revisions — roughly $300 in internal labor before it even goes out. For half of these teams, approvals still run through email and Slack threads.

AI hasn't closed the gap. 70% of teams have deployed it in production, but 88% say the output still needs moderate to substantial human editing before use. AI is getting teams to a first draft — not to launch.

"Marketers were told AI would hand them back time for strategy. Our data says it hasn't happened yet," said Jennifer Delevante, CMO at Knak. "It's not a talent problem or a creativity problem. It's the production layer — the gap between a good idea and a launched campaign. Until that gets fixed, teams will keep buying tools that get them to a draft and leave them stuck before launch."

Key findings from the report include:

• No one is immune from missed deadlines: 85% of marketing teams have missed at least one planned campaign launch date in the past 12 months due to workflow constraints, and 1 in 10 miss launches more than five times per year. The top causes are operational, not creative: getting approvals and sign-off (47%), design and creative production (38%) and coordinating across teams (36%).
• One email is a production project: 60% of teams involve at least four people in producing a single email, and 69% say emails require two to three rounds of revision before launch, totaling over $300 in internal labor costs per send, based on BLS pay data. Meanwhile, 54% use three to five separate tools to produce a single email and 51% still rely on email, Slack or Teams threads as their primary workflow and approval mechanism.
• AI got in the door, but not to the finish line: AI use is concentrated on creative inputs, including first-draft copy generation (64%) and image generation (56%), while only 25% use it to build or code emails and landing pages, where the production burden is heaviest.
• Rising email investment raises the stakes: 88% of teams produce campaign assets for email, nearly 50% above the next channel (paid social, at 60%), and 52% plan to add or significantly increase email spend in the next 12 months.

The report details where advanced AI adopters are pulling ahead, how team structure and tech stack decisions affect production speed and what separates organizations that consistently launch on time from those that don't.

About Knak
Knak is the marketing production platform for enterprise teams — the dedicated system where on-brand emails, landing pages, and digital assets get built, reviewed, and made launch-ready, with AI embedded across the production workflow. Trusted by Google, Amazon, Uber, Meta, OpenAI, Forbes, and Palo Alto Networks.

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SOURCE Knak