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AI makes it very easy to automate whatever is already happening.
That sounds useful until you look closely at the process.
A campaign brief gets copied from a document into a project-management tool. Someone turns it into tasks. Another person asks for missing information in Slack. The copy is drafted, reviewed, moved into a spreadsheet, reformatted for each channel, and then sent back for approval.
AI can speed up almost every part of that.
But it can also help you produce more versions, create more handoffs, and move unclear work around faster.
You end up automating the symptoms of a bad process instead of fixing the process itself.
Before asking, “How can we automate this?”, first ask what the work should actually look like.
Which steps create a useful output? Which ones only exist because of an old tool, a workaround, or unclear ownership? Where does someone need to make a real decision, rather than just approve something because that is what the process says?
Use ChatGPT to pull the workflow apart before you rebuild it.
Try this prompt:
You are a marketing operations consultant. I want to simplify a marketing process before deciding what, if anything, to automate.
Here is the current process:
[Paste the process step by step. Include the people involved, tools used, inputs, outputs, approvals, and handoffs.]
Review it critically. Do not assume every existing step should stay.
1. Diagnose the process
Identify:
- Duplicate work or repeated data entry
- Unnecessary handoffs, meetings, reviews, or approvals
- Steps with unclear ownership or no clear output
- Decisions that are missing, delayed, or being made by the wrong person
- Manual work that may be worth automating later
2. Redesign the workflow
Create a simpler version with:
- The minimum necessary steps, in order
- One clear owner for each step
- The decision that must be made at each approval point
- What should be removed, combined, standardized, or automated
3. Automation recommendations
Only recommend automation where it supports the simplified workflow. Explain what problem each automation solves and what needs to be true before implementing it.
Happy prompting!
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