S3 · AI in marketing operations
The AI Marketing Audit
Where AI genuinely creates leverage in your marketing operation — and where it’s theatre. Three weeks. Fixed scope, fixed price.
Short answer
An AI marketing audit — also sold as an AI readiness assessment or AI maturity review for marketing teams — is a structured review of every team and workflow in a marketing organisation, scored for where AI would create real leverage and where it would only create activity. It is not an audit of AI-generated advertising, and not an AI-search visibility check; it is an operational review of how the marketing organisation works. Mine runs three weeks at a fixed scope and price, and ends in a prioritised roadmap with explicit build-versus-buy calls. The scoring model comes from running the same exercise across 23 teams inside one organisation.
What the audit covers
Every team and workflow in the marketing organisation, reviewed and scored on the same scale, so what comes back is a ranked list. The scale it was built at: 23 teams inside one organisation, as an internal program — not a pilot. Yours takes three weeks.
The scoring
Each workflow gets scored on four axes: how much time it consumes today, how tolerant the output is of being wrong, whether the inputs are actually available to a model, and what it would cost to change. The interesting quadrant — high time, high error-tolerance, available inputs, cheap to change — is usually smaller than anyone expects and almost never where the enthusiasm is.
What comes back
- A ranked roadmap: what to do first, second, and what to explicitly not do
- A build-versus-buy call on each item, with the reasoning behind it
- The workflows where AI would add cost and risk for no gain — named, so the conversation stops
- A capability read on the teams: who can run this themselves and who needs help
- One worked example, built during the audit, so the roadmap isn’t theoretical
What it is not
It isn’t a tool selection exercise, and it isn’t a training program. Both are downstream of knowing which problems are worth pointing a model at, and most organisations buy them in the wrong order — the licences first, the use case afterwards.
- Duration
- Three weeks
- Terms
- Fixed scope, fixed price
- Output
- Prioritized roadmap with build-versus-buy calls
- Precedent
- 23 teams inside one organisation, as an internal program
- Your time
- One workshop, plus 45 minutes per team
The three weeks
Fixed, so you can plan around it.
01
Week 1 · Map
Every team, every recurring workflow, the time each one takes. Forty-five minutes per team, run as an interview rather than a survey — the survey answers are always the aspirational version.
02
Week 2 · Score and prototype
The scoring model applied to everything, then one item from the top of the list actually built, so the roadmap carries a worked example inside it.
03
Week 3 · Decide
A workshop with your leadership to argue the ranking, then the final roadmap with build-versus-buy calls and a sequence you can start on Monday.
Problem Brief
Pressure-test the audit route.
Two practical questions show whether an AI marketing audit is the useful next move.
You are talking to an AI assistant grounded in this site’s published pages. What you type is sent to it and used to write this read; nothing reaches Alexander unless you send it at the end. Describe the problem rather than named people — it needs no personal data.
Rather not do this? [email protected]
Where the judgement comes from
The audit exists because I ran it internally first, at scale.
- 30+
- marketsCRM run across IKEA’s European organisation — governance, localisation, one stack, many countries.
- 20+
- brandsMulti-brand lifecycle orchestration at Bauer Media.
- 550k
- customersFour countries, as Head of CRM & Lifecycle Strategy at Tibber.
- 23
- teamsReviewed and scored for AI leverage — an internal program inside one organisation.
In-house leadership
- IKEA
- Adobe
- Bauer Media
- Tibber
Independent engagements
- Schibsted
- Compricer
- Vivino
Questions about the audit
What does the AI marketing audit cost?
Fixed and quoted before we start. Number of teams is the only variable. Email me the size of the marketing organisation and the quote comes back with the scope attached. The pricing page has the structure in full.
How much of our time does it take?
One 45-minute interview per team, one kickoff, and one closing workshop with your leadership. Everything else is my time. It’s deliberately light, because an audit that eats the quarter it’s auditing tells you very little.
Will you tell us to buy tools?
Sometimes, and I have no incentive either way — I take no vendor commission and sell no licences. As often the answer is that the workflow shouldn’t be automated at all, or that a twenty-line script does what a platform is being sold for.
Is this only for marketing teams?
The scoring model is general, but the calibration is marketing: I know what good looks like in CRM, lifecycle, content and campaign operations, and I can tell an ambitious plan from an unrealistic one. Outside marketing I’d be guessing, and I’d rather say so.
What happens after the audit?
Often nothing from me — the roadmap is built to be executed by your own teams, and that is the intended outcome. If the top of the list turns out to be lifecycle work, you’ll know that too, and roughly what it would take.
Where should we start with AI in marketing?
Not with a tool, and almost never with the workflow the enthusiasm is pointing at. Start by listing every recurring workflow you have and putting four numbers on each: how much time it takes today, how tolerant the output is of being wrong, whether the inputs a model would need actually exist in a system, and what it would cost to change. What scores high on all four is where you start, and that list is nearly always shorter and duller than expected. The audit is that exercise done properly, in three weeks, with one item from the top of the list actually built.
How is this different from a free AI readiness assessment?
What gets scored. The free maturity quizzes and self-assessments score the company — a level, a chart, a comparison against an industry — and as the first piece of paper in a leadership discussion they do that job perfectly well. What they don’t do is look at your actual work. This scores every team and every recurring workflow you have, through interviews rather than self-assessment, and builds one item from the top of the list for real before the roadmap is handed over. The difference in outcome: one gives you a level, the other gives you an order to start in on Monday.
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Start a conversation
If the timing fits, email me directly. The reply comes from me — no autoresponder, no sequence.