#workflow_design

Most marketing teams deploy AI to accelerate existing work—drafting emails, generating variations, scoring leads faster. Liza Adams, founder of GrowthPath Partners, argues this efficiency-first approach misses the real opportunity: reimagining workflows to do work that wasn't possible before. An efficiency-only strategy quietly makes the case for fewer people; reimagined work makes the case for why humans are essential. Adams proposes a test: if removing AI just slows things down, you're optimizing old work. If you wouldn't do it at all without AI—because it was too slow, expensive, or impossible—you've found the sweet spot. She identifies common failure modes: treating AI adoption as a licensing decision rather than a strategy, confusing training problems with belief problems, and reorganizing before rethinking the work itself. She also highlights a less-discussed obstacle: leaders who shut down experimentation after the first failure, killing the culture of learning. At MAICON 2026, Adams will guide marketing leaders through identifying which workflows merit reimagining, designing agentic human+AI systems with proper human gates, and building frameworks they can apply to their own teams.

Most marketing teams deploy AI to accelerate existing work—drafting emails, generating variations, scoring leads faster. Liza Adams, founder of GrowthPath Partners, argues this efficiency-first approach misses the real opportunity: reimagining workflows to do work that wasn't possible before. An efficiency-only strategy quietly makes the case for fewer people; reimagined work makes the case for why humans are essential. Adams proposes a test: if removing AI just slows things down, you're optimizing old work. If you wouldn't do it at all without AI—because it was too slow, expensive, or impossible—you've found the sweet spot. She identifies common failure modes: treating AI adoption as a licensing decision rather than a strategy, confusing training problems with belief problems, and reorganizing before rethinking the work itself. She also highlights a less-discussed obstacle: leaders who shut down experimentation after the first failure, killing the culture of learning. At MAICON 2026, Adams will guide marketing leaders through identifying which workflows merit reimagining, designing agentic human+AI systems with proper human gates, and building frameworks they can apply to their own teams.