AI promised to save you time. Here’s how to make it deliver.

Stephanie Nivinskus is principal at Ragan’s Center for AI Strategy.

When generative AI became mainstream in early 2023, companies bought into a productivity promise: AI would help teams complete more work in less time by reducing manual, repetitive tasks.

Three years later, Adobe’s 2026 “The State of Marketing in an AI-Driven World” report revealed 84% of organizations missed at least one marketing opportunity last quarter because their workflows could not respond in time.

We have the AI tools and use cases, so what obstacle is preventing the productivity promise from being realized?

There is no clear answer to this question yet, so we asked advisors from Ragan’s Center for AI Strategy, “What is one task that comms and marketing professionals are still largely doing manually that they should hand to AI this week?” Here are their answers:

1. Skip the doomscrolling and summon an agent.

Alex Sevigny, McMaster University: “Social media is very time-consuming and can pull you into a black hole of brain rot and doomscrolling. Instead of this, get an agent from any of the frontier models or even your own self-hosted LLM to read social media for you and put together a summary with links. You will get a better sense of what is out there and save loads of time.”

2. Let the robots handle reporting.
   
   Laura Gagliardi, Laura Writes Stories: Many comms teams still have someone manually reading through clip reports, coverage emails or Google alerts and writing a weekly digest by hand. Instead, turn to tools like ChatGPT or Claude. Upload the week’s coverage links and/or text, and ask for a summary organized by theme, tone and key messages reflected. You’ll get a clean brief in minutes and your team’s time goes toward the analysis and response.
3. Use Copilot to triage email.

Michael Lamp, Hunter: Many people are scrolling through their inboxes more than necessary every morning. This remains one of Microsoft Copilot’s strongest advantages to productivity in the AI era. Beyond summarizing emails, you can build agents to auto-detect threads with more replies than normal so that you can contribute to urgent conversations in real-time. I also find Copilot to be a fabulous way to get a return to office read-me file on all the Teams threads I missed while traveling.

4. Have AI identify the FAQs that belong in your press releases.

Brian Snyder, Burson: Paste your draft release into your AI of choice with this prompt: “Read this press release and generate 5 questions a skeptical journalist would ask, 5 a confused customer would ask and 5 a cautious investor would ask. Pick the 3–5 most likely to be typed into an AI search engine. Write a direct, factual answer to each in under 40 words. Do not repeat language from the release’s headline or boilerplate.” Edit and refine the AI output for accuracy, legal sensitivities and tone. In just five minutes, you’ve added a section that materially improves whether AI answer engines cite your release or your competitor’s. Focus your AI efforts on improving outputs and outcomes, not just saving time.

5. Let AI turn meeting notes into follow-up memos.

Ryan Brack, Moon Howl Media: Most communicators still sit through client or leadership calls and then spend another hour or more translating notes into decisions, messaging guidance, next steps and executive recaps.

I feed my meeting notes into Claude (often supplemented with Granola notes) and have it co-create things like concise executive summaries, decisions-made lists, draft follow-up emails and client or leadership draft memos.

What to do now

Pick one task on this list and delegate it to AI. Measure the time you reclaim. Rinse and repeat.