By Laura Browne, Digital Director at krow Group
The pace of marketing technology is relentless, and it’s leaving marketers feeling behind. New automation software and AI tools are now released every month, often with meaningful improvements rather than minor updates.
For marketers trying to stay up to date, this can be intimidating. Many marketing agencies have already fallen behind the AI curve, with recent surveys showing almost half of B2B marketers recognise an AI skills gap within their team.
Marketers don’t need to learn the complete ins and outs of every new AI tool. They need to learn how that tool fits into the way they work.
With the right workflows in place, AI adoption will become simpler. It does not need to be correct the first time, and it’s okay to still be learning. The key is creating a system that makes this learning easier.
Technology does not need to be stressful
AI, like the internet before it, has changed how work gets done, but marketers don’t need to learn every AI tool any more than they need to memorise every webpage. The value comes from using the right tools well, not mastering them all.
The challenge now is how to adapt to new AI innovations without needing to regularly rebuild teams, processes, or ways of working.
Rather than betting on individual tools or platforms, marketers have an opportunity to rethink how work happens in their organisations, and how new technologies can make these processes more efficient.
Workflows with multi-model capabilities allow teams to absorb new technology as it emerges, testing, adopting or discarding models without destabilising the wider operation. As the range of automation and execution tools increase, the ability to design adaptable workflows will become far more valuable than expertise in any single tool.
The marketer’s responsibility will be the system
The role of the marketer will move away from progressing individual briefs through each stage of delivery, and towards setting up systems that can do this work repeatedly and consistently.
Here, the real effort happens upfront: defining objectives, supplying context, training models, setting guardrails, and deciding where human judgement must intervene. Once established, these workflows reduce the need for constant supervision and manual coordination.
We’re already seeing signs that this way of thinking is gaining traction, with Figma’s move to acquire Weavy signalling a strong endorsement of workflow-based thinking, alongside others such as N8N and Google Opal.
It shows that the future isn’t just about better creative tools, but about how tools connect across teams. Design, content, data and execution are no longer discrete stages managed in isolation. They’re components within a system, connected by workflows rather than managed through handovers.
Of course, this flexibility comes with considerations. As workflows provide access to multiple AI models, often from different providers, questions around compliance, ownership and commercial usage remain unresolved. These issues will require collaboration with legal, IT and governance teams, but they shouldn’t overshadow the broader shift in how marketing work is organised.
Marketing will change, but marketers will stay
Despite the speed of innovation, everyone is still learning. The concepts underpinning generative and assistive AI workflows are still emerging. Feeling behind is understandable, but often misleading. There are no true experts yet, only people who started earlier.
For marketers getting started now, the focus should not be to master every new tool or model. It should be on learning how to design effective workflows: how context is supplied, how decisions are automated, and where human judgement adds the most value.
Here, marketers are the overseers. They instruct, predict, and measure the effectiveness of the components in the system, and tweak it as necessary. Marketers will become the designers of the workflow – a modern creative process.
