Back to Blogs
Drew Neisser is the founder of CMO Huddles and a globally recognized authority on B2B marketing. He’s an AdAge columnist, LinkedIn TopVoice, leading CMO coach, podcast host & friend of penguins everywhere.
“The pressure to do more with less is not new. It is the expectation that AI can 10x productivity that is killing me,” said a PE-backed SaaS CMO. That distinction matters. AI should help marketing create leverage: Sharper decisions, better judgment, and faster learning. It should not simply turn teams into faster content factories.
“The pressure to do more with less is not new. It is the expectation that AI can 10x productivity that is killing me,” lamented a CMO from a PE-backed SaaS company.
Yikes.
The mandate to do more with less has been around forever. What feels different now is the assumption that AI makes 10x productivity not just possible, but mandatory.
At first glance, this sounds like progress. AI gives teams the ability to produce, analyze, and experiment faster. It reduces friction in starting projects and lowers the cost of iteration.
That sounds like pure upside until the time saved simply gets filled with more work.
Before AI, a leader had three fundamental jobs: Set direction, make decisions, and create the conditions for people to do their best work.
Those jobs have not changed. But the speed and scale at which decisions compound absolutely have.
Geoff Woods, in The AI-Driven Leader, makes a bold claim that leaders can 10x the impact of every employee. I hesitantly agree with the spirit of it. Leaders should understand these tools well enough to unlock step-function gains.
But 10x impact is not the same as 10x output.
If every marketer produces 10x more content, does the brand get 10x stronger? If every team runs 10x more campaigns, does revenue grow 10x faster? Or do we just create 10x more slop?
This is where leadership gets real.
When AI creates capacity, leaders make a choice. Do we increase volume, increase quality, increase experimentation, increase learning, cut staff, or create breathing room?
Most organizations default to volume. That is how AI leverage quietly turns into AI exhaustion.
The goal should not be 10x labor. It should be 10x leverage: Faster insight to decision, sharper positioning, more strategic focus, and better judgment applied to the right problems.
For CMOs especially, AI makes it easier to push things into the market. More content. More touchpoints. More activity.
The danger is not doing too little. It is flooding the market and your team with too much. When everything accelerates, clarity erodes.
Acceleration without clarity leads to burnout.
CMOs now have to design how humans and machines work together. That means deciding what stops, not just what starts. Which reports disappear? Which meetings get shorter? Which workflows become self-serve? Which content gets killed because it never helped? Which insights move directly into action?
That is the uncomfortable part.
AI can be a gift to marketing teams. It can also become a very polite machine for assigning everyone more work.
The difference is leadership.
Output means more things produced. Leverage means better decisions, faster learning, and more impact from the same or fewer resources.
Because executives may assume AI capacity should translate into instant growth without recognizing the need for strategy, training, governance, and focus.
Sometimes. But only when more content improves relevance, conversion, trust, or learning. Volume alone is not a strategy.
Stop low-value reporting, redundant reviews, unused content production, and meetings that AI-enabled workflows can replace or shorten.