We’ve talked before about operational debt: the small workarounds, shortcuts and compromises that seem perfectly sensible at the time, but gradually build up and make a business harder to run.
We think AI could be creating a similar problem. Not because businesses are using AI badly. In many cases, quite the opposite. AI is making it easier than ever to get things done - we can write faster, analyse more data, create more content, automate more tasks and produce things that would previously have taken hours in a matter of minutes. That’s all incredibly useful stuff.
But there is a question we don't think enough businesses are asking yet: What are we creating by making everything faster?
Because when the barrier to producing something drops dramatically, it becomes very easy to produce more of it. More content, more campaigns, more variations, more reports, more automations, more data. And all of these are more things for someone, somewhere, to review, manage, maintain or make sense of later.
And that’s AI debt. AI debt is the work, complexity and clutter we create today by using AI to accelerate something without thinking about what happens next.
And just like operational debt, it rarely arrives looking like a problem. It usually arrives disguised as a productivity win. We think “AI can do that for us,” So, we let it. The question is whether, six months or 2 years from now, we’ll be glad we did.
The productivity trap
One of the most appealing things about AI is also one of the things we need to be slightly careful about. It makes things faster!
For years, marketing teams have had a fairly obvious constraint: there are only so many hours in the day. There is only so much content you can write, data you can analyse, campaigns you can build and reports you can produce.
But AI can change that equation. You can turn a report into a LinkedIn post in seconds. Ask for ten variations. Turn those into an email. Create a campaign outline. Generate some subject lines. Repurpose the original content into social posts. Build a first draft of the next thing before you've even finished reviewing the last one.
And that's fantastic when it removes work that needs doing. But what happens when the ability to create something becomes so easy that we stop asking whether it needs creating in the first place? That's where the productivity gain can become a trap.
Instead of struggling to produce enough marketing, we can find ourselves with more marketing than we have time to properly consider; more content to review; more campaigns to manage; more variations to choose between; more dashboards to look at; more automated notifications and more things sitting in the CRM.
AI hasn't created a problem by doing its job well. We've created one by assuming that because we can produce more, we should.
When more isn't better
Marketing has always had a strange relationship with volume and thinking that more is good, volume is what we want! More leads, more traffic, more followers, more content, more campaigns. We've spent years trying to make marketing teams more efficient so they can do more with the same resources.
AI is the most powerful efficiency tool we've had for doing exactly that. But perhaps the interesting question now isn't how much more can we do, but what should we stop doing now that we can do the important things faster?
If AI saves your team five hours a week, that's great. But the real value comes from what you do with those five hours. If they’re simply filled with five more tasks that AI can also help you complete, you've made the machine faster without necessarily making the business better.
The opportunity is to use the time differently. It might be to think more or to talk to customers or properly look at the data. You might use some time to challenge the strategy or improve a long-forgotten process. You might want to have that conversation that keeps getting pushed down the list because there is always another campaign to get out.
AI can create capacity. What we do with that capacity is still up to us.
When AI accelerates the wrong thing
This is where AI debt starts to look a lot like the operational debt we've talked about before.
Imagine your marketing process is already a little messy. There are spreadsheets alongside the CRM. Someone manually moves leads from one system to another. Reporting involves pulling information from three different places. Campaign approvals happen through email. Nobody is entirely sure which version of a list is the latest one.
Then AI arrives. Suddenly you can create the reports faster, summarise the data faster, write the emails faster, generate campaign ideas faster and build automations faster.
It feels like great progress!
But the underlying process hasn't changed. You've simply increased the speed at which the work moves through it. That's an important distinction. AI can accelerate a good marketing operation. It can also accelerate a bad one. The latter is particularly dangerous because it can make an inefficient process feel efficient.
The output looks impressive. Things are happening quickly. Everyone feels productive. Meanwhile, the underlying mess is still there.
Don't automate chaos
We spend many calls with clients encouraging them to automate repetitive sales and marketing tasks, and rightly so.
Automation can remove hours of unnecessary administration and make a huge difference to how a team works. But before you automate it, you need to properly understand it. If a process is unnecessarily complicated, automate it and you've simply made a complicated process faster. For example:
- If nobody knows who owns a task, automation doesn't solve the ownership problem.
- If your CRM data is inconsistent, AI doesn't magically make it reliable.
- If five people have five different ways of doing something, giving all five people an AI tool doesn't create a standard process. It potentially creates five much faster versions of the same problem.
We should probably be a little more suspicious of the phrase ‘we can automate that’ than we have been.
And the answer might not always be automation. The answer might be deletion or simplification. It might be finally deciding who is responsible for something.
Sometimes automation IS exactly the right answer. The trick is knowing which one you're dealing with.
Your data is about to matter even more
There's another reason AI debt could become particularly important for marketing teams: data. AI is incredibly good at finding patterns, summarising information, comparing records and helping us interrogate large amounts of data. That's potentially transformative for businesses.
But it also means the quality of the information we're feeding into these systems matters more than ever. AI doesn't remove the need for good data. In fact it makes it more important than ever and makes makes the consequences of bad data bigger!
A CRM full of duplicate contacts, inconsistent lifecycle stages, incomplete records and outdated information was already a problem. If you're now using AI to analyse that CRM, identify opportunities, prioritise leads or make recommendations, the problem doesn't disappear, it just gets embedded into the output.
This is why getting the fundamentals right still matters.
The knowledge problem
There's another kind of debt that's easy to overlook… knowledge. Every business has knowledge that isn't written down.
It’s the little things which remain only in people’s heads, for example, the way a particular client likes to work or the reason a particular process exists. It’s all those little details that don't appear in a CRM field but make someone very good at their job.
AI can help us capture and use some of that knowledge. But it can also make it easier to skip the process of capturing it properly.
Why bother documenting the process or have SOP’s when we can just ask AI to do the task?
Why build a proper workflow when we can create a clever prompt?
The answer is that it’s important because eventually, someone else needs to understand it and be able to maintain it. Someone needs to know what happens when it doesn't work.
The more we rely on AI, the more important human knowledge and judgement become, not less.
What should we do about AI debt?
We're certainly not suggesting businesses slow down their use of AI. Quite the opposite! The possibilities and usefulness of AI are almost beyond measure at this point.
There are enormous opportunities to use it to remove repetitive admin, interrogate data, improve insight, speed up research, support creativity and make marketing operations more efficient.
But perhaps we need to get slightly better at asking what happens next. Before introducing another AI tool, another automation or another way of generating content, it is worth asking:
- What problem are we trying to solve?
- Is this something we need to do at all?
- What happens after AI has done its bit?
- Who owns the output?
- What data is it relying on?
- Will someone else understand how this works?
- What happens if the tool changes or disappears?
- Are we reducing work, or simply creating more output?
- Are we making the business better, or just making it faster?
None of these questions are anti-AI. They are about making sure we use AI where it creates genuine value, rather than simply because it can.
What’s next?
AI is going to become a much bigger part of how businesses work. The opportunity isn't to resist it, and it's certainly not to pretend that marketing should continue to work exactly as it did before. It's to get better at deciding where it belongs.
The businesses that benefit most from AI will be the ones that understand what they want AI to improve. They'll have good data for it to work with, clear processes for it to support and people who understand the context behind the work. And enough discipline to ask whether something needs doing before asking AI to do it faster.
That's probably the biggest lesson from operational debt too. You don’t want to stop fixing things, you just need to try and stop adding more layers to things that were already too complicated.
AI gives us an extraordinary opportunity to remove a huge amount of unnecessary work from marketing. Let's just make sure we don't use it to create a whole new pile of new unnecessary work at the same time.
And if you're wondering whether your own marketing operation is becoming more efficient or simply more complicated, it's probably worth taking a look under the bonnet.
We'd be happy to help you work out where the friction is, whether that's in your CRM, your data, your processes, your automation or the way you're using AI or your other systems. Get in touch for a chat if it’s of interest.