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Marketing leaders use AI to remove bottlenecks and speed up creative production
Marketing teams use AI to reduce production time, cutting one 127-hour campaign to 5 hours. This saves 16 days of resources for original creative work.
Creative teams are turning to AI to strip out production bottlenecks, reclaim hundreds of hours, and protect the time needed for original thinking, according to three marketing leaders in a new Campaign video produced with monday.com.
The discussion, part of a broader look at AI for Marketing, features David Killick, head of communications at giffgaff, David Sheldrick, founder of SEED, Found's Creative AI studio, and Christy Kelly, executive director of analytics, insights, strategy and innovation at Marina Maher Communications. Their experiences reveal how AI is reshaping creative workflows not by replacing human input, but by clearing the path to it.
Reclaiming 16 days of resource
For Killick, the most immediate payoff is capacity. He cited a recent campaign that originally took 127 hours to produce. "We re-ran that exact same process with AI, and were able to create it in five hours," he said. "The most interesting thing to me was we now had 16 days of resource we could use elsewhere."
The shift isn't about cutting corners. It's about redirecting skilled time toward tasks that demand human judgment-concept development, strategic refinement, and the kind of experimentation that leads to breakthrough work.
Accelerating everything around the idea
Kelly pointed to AI's role in compressing the non-creative steps that surround the core act of ideation. "AI can support the end-to-end process," she said, "so the whole process can move faster, and the time for the actual creative thinking, which is the most important part, is preserved as much as possible."
That framing matters for teams who often spend more time on logistics-asset versioning, formatting, approvals-than on the creative work itself. By handling those repetitive layers, AI returns the clock to the people who need it most.
The hybrid content sweet spot
Sheldrick sees the strongest creative potential in blending real and AI-generated elements. He described a Meta Moments campaign for The Hoxton hotels, where the team shot real photographs and then used AI to turn them into animated ad sets. "For me this is the sweet spot in content production and AI," he said.
This approach keeps the authenticity of original photography while adding motion and scale that would be impractical to produce manually. It points to a model where AI extends creative possibilities rather than fabricating them from scratch.
Why this matters for Creatives
The 127-hour-to-5-hour example is not a story about automation replacing talent. It's a signal that the most tedious parts of production can now be compressed, giving creative professionals more room to do the work they were trained for. For those in creative roles, the practical takeaway is clear: the time saved on execution can be reinvested in the messy, non-linear process of generating ideas that actually stand out. The teams that treat AI as a production assistant-not a replacement for taste-will be the ones who gain the most ground.