One person got 10x faster. The team got left behind.
This is the pattern I see in almost every marketing org right now. Someone builds a brilliant AI workflow. It works beautifully for them. Then they try to hand it off and discover that solo productivity doesn't transfer. Context is trapped in one person's head, one person's prompts, one person's workarounds.
Marketing is multiplayer. Shared brand context, shared governance, shared learning loops across writers, designers, strategists, approvers. Almost every AI tool being built treats it as single-player.
Ann Miura-Ko put it well: "80% of employees use AI weekly!" is probably true and also meaningless. Microsoft's research is more telling: organizational factors account for 2x the AI impact of individual factors. The compounding isn't in the tool. It's in the system around it.
Intercom and Ramp didn't win because they gave individuals better tools. They built shared infrastructure first, then let individuals move fast within it.
The marketer every org needs right now can do both: build fast individually and design systems that let the whole team compound.
I wrote about the four layers where this plays out and what the single-player to multiplayer shift actually looks like in practice.
Full piece is on Substack. Link in comments.