We optimised the workflow and broke the deliverable

Modern CRM platforms can trigger an email, SMS or push message to a user in seconds using rule-based workflows. Each step inside that workflow has got cheaper because of AI. Copy generation, subject lines, send-time optimisation. The plumbing has been solved.

Unfortunately the deliverable that lands in the customer's lap looks more average than ever.

Open my inbox on any given week and I'll see three near-identical "we miss you" emails from three different brands. They've got similar subject lines, a product carousel of my recently viewed items (that's if they are 'advanced'), and a discount code. The same template is used regardless of what product or category I'm interested in. It doesn't shift from brand led, to editorial, to practical depending on what kind of person I am and where I am in my buying cycle presently.

CRM managers have traded taste for speed.

And for several years now this has started to become noticeable in the metrics. Open rates are down, unsubscribes are going up, and revenue isn't climbing as fast as the marketing plan you presented to your boss said it would.

Ronan Shields at Digiday warned of the risks of using agents that "fail, bias outcomes, optimize toward the wrong goals, or simply produce mediocre work at scale."

What if the workflow was never the bottleneck — and we just spent five years optimising the wrong layer?

The deliverable, the thing the customer actually sees and reads and decides on, is where the differentiation has to come from. AI that is designed to build a workflow faster, in my opinion, isn't the right approach.

Imagine if your workflow stayed the same, but the deliverable was generated per-customer although I'm not sure we can get there, not per broad segment.

Imagine the system instead asked: what's the smallest unit you can have an agent inspect (and still keep computable in a reasonable timeframe and at a reasonable cost) and still have the customer experience it as personal? The agents should be spending most of their effort on improving the deliverable, not the workflow logic.

More of the SAME workflows isn't the answer. SOMETHING has to decide what each customer actually sees, and that thing needs to be better.