Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke recently warned employees against tossing “AI slop grenades” to coworkers: using AI to generate something quickly, then shifting the burden of reviewing, interpreting, or fixing it to someone else.

Marketing leaders should pay attention. It’s not enough to worry about AI slop reaching customers and burying editors, creative teams, and other experts in work they have to repair. There’s a broader problem emerging inside organizations: AI can make an individual employee more productive while making the organization less efficient.

If AI saves one employee 20 minutes but creates 30 minutes of work downstream for others, that’s not a productivity win. It’s creating more work.

Set Rules For AI Experimentation

Some of this is a predictable consequence of where organizations are in their AI adoption. In my new report, The State Of Content Creation And Optimization Solutions, 2026 (Forrester license required), 66% of marketing leaders say their organizations are still encouraging experimentation as they determine the right mix of AI capabilities for content and creative work.

Experimentation is necessary. Marketing teams need opportunities to learn what AI does well, where human expertise matters, and how different tools fit the work. But experimentation without norms can push the cost of learning onto someone else.

When organizations haven’t yet developed a standard model for AI enablement across content and creative work, giving employees access to AI tools or training them to write better prompts isn’t enough. Leaders also need to establish when AI should be used, what quality threshold its output must meet, when human review is required, and who remains accountable for the work at each stage of the content lifecycle. Although experimentation means tolerating imperfect learning, that doesn’t mean tolerating team members transferring unfinished work to someone else.

Measure AI Productivity Across The Content Workflow

The first phase of genAI adoption emphasized individual productivity: Every employee learned they can draft an email, create a presentation, or develop a campaign brief faster. But now we’re getting to a more difficult phase.

An editor spent 20 minutes correcting a draft. The creative team rebuilt an unusable asset. Three colleagues used AI to process something another employee used AI to create. A customer received generic AI-generated content that eroded confidence in your brand.

Marketing leaders need to focus on the end-to-end workflow. Work with teams to determine whether AI reduced the total time, effort, and cost required to produce a useful outcome, including the work it created for everyone downstream.

Individual AI productivity alone isn’t enough. Enterprise context, approved knowledge, brand standards, governance, and guardrails can make AI-generated work more consistent and dependable. But leaders still have to decide where AI fits, where humans step in, and how the work moves from start to finish. As more work moves into AI-enabled workflows, leaders also need visibility into which AI capabilities those workflows use, how much AI those workflows consume, and what they cost.

Prepare For Content Work To Shift

Fifty-one percent of marketing leaders say their organizations are reducing their reliance on agencies as they adopt AI for content and creative work. That means some internal teams are developing capabilities for work they previously handed to an agency, freelancer, or other external partner. Give them room to learn. But don’t mistake today’s experimentation for the destination.

My report signals what comes next: consolidating tools, standardizing workflows, and eventually restructuring organizations around new ways of working. Those changes will take longer, and they understandably put employees on edge. Leaders need to be candid about where the transition is headed while giving people the support to build the skills they’ll need to get there.

Turn AI Experimentation Into Repeatable Work

Moving from individual AI experimentation to governed, repeatable ways of working takes time. If you’re assessing your current content capabilities, evaluating content creation and optimization solutions, or determining which workflows to standardize and redesign for AI, contact us. We can help you identify where to focus now and what to build toward next.

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