Thought Leadership
Welcome to the Old Workflow Apocalypse, email marketers, DTC pros, and ecommerce hustlers! We’re right alongside you.
Picture this: You log in Monday morning, only to realize your trusty email workflow has self-imploded. Your once-slick automations are completely different, your SOPs are basically irrelevant and your team is halfway through a collective meltdown over a new, executive-mandated AI tool that rewrites all your subject lines to sound like dad jokes.
Now that was a joke. However, it’s estimated that 30% of work hours will be AI-automated by 2030, so perhaps that future isn’t too far off. The real-life processes of AI change management will vary from business to business, brand to brand. The only definite things here are that it will happen . . . and that you can be prepared for when you need to change your ecommerce workflow and welcome new email workflow tools into your tech stack.
Whether you’re in lifecycle marketing, email marketing or ecommerce operations, consider this blog your bombproof bunker. Below, we’ll talk about how to survive and thrive when AI workflow automation breaks everything you built . . . and then builds something better.
AI Broke My Workflow. Now What?
First, breathe. Then assess. When AI workflow tools crash into your marketing org, they don’t always play nice at the start. You may find:
Ecommerce workflows are turned upside down. Legacy marketing SOPs may clash with new tools, insights and suggestions.
Training deficits are real. Nearly 70% of marketers report they have not received any formal AI training, despite using or being expected to use AI-driven tools within their workflows.
Bottlenecks can arise. AI automation brings significant change, but if adoption gets slowed by a failure to accelerate learning, this can lead to bottlenecks and short-term reduced productivity.
For email marketers in DTC or ecommerce, these disruptions can live anywhere on the spectrum from annoying to mission-critical. Suddenly, your finely tuned email workflow automation could be a not-so-beautiful mess.
But regardless, here's the kicker: This type of chaos = a new type of opportunity.
Understanding Agentic Workflow Shifts
Agentic AI is designed to act autonomously with minimal human oversight. It can independently plan, reason, adapt to changing conditions and make decisions to achieve specific goals. For ecommerce marketers, AI agentic workflows can generate content or recommendations, autonomously manage campaigns, analyze customer behavior, adjust marketing strategies and optimize user journeys.
These tools don't wait for you to tell them what to do. Rather, they act, react and adapt, making decisions faster and customer experiences more personalized.
When handled correctly, this type of AI change management will result in marketing workflows that are no longer linear. With decision making agentic AI in your toolkit, your email workflows can be responsive to individual consumers, more attuned to their interests and more likely to convert subscribers, based on what AI understands about each of them.
Key takeaway: Marketers need to unlearn the static and embrace the fluid in today’s agentic AI wave. By doing so, you’ll allow your outputs to be significantly more personalized, and therefore, increasingly revenue-delivering.
The Evolving Roles of Humans in AI Marketing Workflows
Repeat after me: AI is not replacing you. In fact, AI is not so much replacing marketing jobs as it is reshaping them to complement human skills, enabling marketers to focus on higher-value strategic and creative tasks.
Think of it this way: Now is your moment to evolve. Marketers are now—and will remain—essential for:
Strategy and lifecycle planning
Maintaining brand voice and integrity
Creative storytelling and campaign arcs
Ethical oversight and context
Smart teams are already rethinking roles. With content writers learning how to become prompt engineers, email managers turning into agentic workflow architects and marketing generalists evolving into AI-fluent specialists ushering in a new creative Renaissance.
Change management marketing is all about researching AI tools, pursuing new knowledge, repositioning your skillsets and rewiring your SOPs for optimal personalization and output.
Rebuilding Your Email Workflows for the AI Era
Did you know that nearly 63% of marketers utilize AI tools in their email marketing tasks? Whether your email workflows are fully-automated or you’re simply using ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas for your next send, you can always improve your processes or start new ones off on the right foot.
When adapting your ecommerce email workflows to account for new AI tools, perform a mini self-audit and answer the following questions:
What are you automating? Are you automating entire communication processes or something smaller, like segmenting subscriber lists?
Where are your workflows rigid? What can change? What can’t? And why?
Which tools talk to each other? Do you need these communications to continue, and if so, how can these processes be adapted or maintained?
When selecting the best email marketing tools and agentic AI solutions, be sure to rebuild your workflows with flexibility and AI workflow automation platforms that support:
Real-time behavior tracking & predictive personalization: Take the guesswork out of personalization by predicting subscriber behavior.
Multi-channel syncing: Coordinate customer messaging across email, SMS, push notifications, etc.
Self-optimizing sequences: These are automated flows that continuously improve themselves, without manual intervention.
Real-Time AI Change Management for Marketing Teams
When AI change management hits, panic amongst teams is natural. This is where leadership matters the most. You can instill confidence in your AI solutions and mitigate employees’ or teammates’ panic, all while helping your marketing efforts thrive!
When spearheading AI change management, you should:
Communicate clearly: Explain the what, why and when behind AI rollouts.
Train in advance: Run short, targeted educational sessions on AI workflow automation tools, the strategies behind them and how to use them.
Pilot smart: Soft-launch new workflows before going all-in.
Document thoughtfully: Turn every change into a learning loop.
Feedback hard: Make team input central to your AI adoption cycle. You’ll want to take both positive and negative feedback into consideration in the future.
Real change management marketing works by constantly adapting. It’s not just about updating workflows. This concept of change is indicative of a wider work-culture shift. And if your marketing workflow automation can’t evolve, consider it dead weight.
Your job is to stay in the loop, keep iterating and ensure your email workflows constantly improve, just as AI does.
Ready to Rewire Your Marketing Workflow?
Change can feel brutal, but in this case, it’s a power-up. If your ecommerce workflow or email automation setup is stuck in the past, it’s time to rethink and rebuild.
Want help? Backstroke builds and sends 31% higher-converting emails in under 5 minutes, thanks to its proprietary ecommerce dataset and suite of new agentic AI tools.
Schedule a demo with us to see how it works.
Because when the robots come for your workflows, you don’t hide. You reprogram.
