Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
Back in March, my team and I dove headfirst into AI. ChatGPT-4 had just dropped, Gemini was rolling out, and the outputs were… honestly, jaw-dropping. Suddenly, I could get deep strategy docs, smart blog drafts, even campaign outlines that felt eerily close to what a senior strategist might write.
It felt like magic.
And then reality hit.
The honeymoon with prompts
At first, prompting felt like the future. I’d type a request, and boom — a draft blog post, an outline for a campaign, even some positioning ideas.
Everyone on my team started doing the same. We had ChatGPT windows open, Gemini tabs running, Claude threads scattered across browsers. It felt exciting. It felt fast.
But here’s the thing: everyone was doing it differently. One person had clever prompt formulas. Another winged it. Some outputs looked sharp, others missed the mark entirely.
We tried to “fix” it with a shared Notion page — a little prompt library. Nobody used it. Dead on arrival.
And when you zoomed out, the cracks were obvious:
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No shared process.
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No shared context (ICPs, competitor research, positioning).
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No consistency across outputs.
It was chaos dressed up as productivity.
The scaling problem nobody talks about
Prompts work fine if you’re a solo operator hacking together an email or blog draft. But inside a team? That’s where the wheels fall off.
Here’s what I noticed in my own org:
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Skill gaps widened. Some people became “prompt magicians,” others just gave up.
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Outputs lost credibility. I’d see drafts with completely different messaging or tone.
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Context disappeared. Our ICPs, positioning docs, research — all lived in a forgotten Notion file instead of being baked into outputs.
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Models kept changing. One week GPT-4 was best, then Gemini caught up, then Claude pulled ahead. We were constantly chasing the “right tool.”
And meanwhile, the chats piled up. Thousands of them. Scattered across tools. Unsearchable. Impossible to manage.
The promise of speed was there… but the operational cost was enormous.
The moment it broke for me
The turning point came when we needed a press release. Normally, that would’ve taken a few hours, back-and-forth reviews, and plenty of coffee.
Instead, we tried something new: an early agentic workflow we’d built. It pulled in our context, followed the PR structure step by step, and produced a draft in three minutes.
It wasn’t just fast — it was right. Structured, consistent, and 90% production-ready.
That’s when it clicked: prompts alone aren’t enough. You need workflows.
Why prompts ≠ marketing
Marketing isn’t just words on a page. It’s systems thinking.
If you’re building an SEO strategy, for example, you can’t just say “write me a plan.” You need to provide:
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Your ICPs
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Your budget
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Competitors
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Positioning and messaging
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Business goals
That’s too much for one prompt. You need a flow — a logical sequence where each step builds on the last.
Same with a content strategy. With prompts, it’s weeks of messy back-and-forth. With workflows, it’s half a day: context in → plan out → review → done.
What I learned, the hard way
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Prompts are personal. Everyone uses them differently. That means outputs are inconsistent and unscalable.
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Teams need structure. Without workflows, context gets lost and trust breaks down.
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AI moves too fast. Models change monthly. Maintaining good outputs without a system is impossible.
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Workflows free people. Once we moved to agent flows, my team spent less time prompting and more time thinking, reviewing, and being creative.
Where I landed
Today, I still use prompts — for quick ideas, a bit of brainstorming, or a one-off draft. But when it comes to serious marketing work, I don’t trust prompts alone anymore.
I trust workflows.
Because in the end, marketing isn’t about the perfect prompt. It’s about:
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Repeatable processes.
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Reliable outputs.
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Giving your team the space to do what only humans can: strategy, creativity, empathy.
Prompts gave me speed. Workflows gave me confidence.
And that’s the day I stopped believing in AI prompts.
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