In my previous article, Try or Die: Bold Marketing is Safe Marketing, I made the case that most marketing teams are optimizing their campaigns to death. Chasing half-percent gains in conversion while their broader strategy quietly flatlines. If you aren't allocating 5 to 15% of your budget to experimentation, you are effectively managing a slow decline.
But I know the pushback. I've sat in those boardrooms. The hesitation comes down to a simple, reasonable concern: C-suite leaders don't want to burn budget on ideas that seem risky. They need to see a credible path to ROI before they greenlight anything that feels unfamiliar. That isn’t a lack of nerves. It’s the reality of being a responsible steward of a company’s capital.
The problem is that demanding proof-of-concept before committing resources often meant killing the idea entirely. If you wanted to test a bold mobile app experience or a complex multi-channel customer journey, you needed a creative team, a development budget, and months of work just to bring the idea to life enough to evaluate it. Most of those ideas died in the conference room. Or they were never presented at all, because they were too "out there" to survive the conversation without something tangible behind them.
AI doesn't eliminate that pressure. The speed of business hasn't slowed down, and the scrutiny on budget hasn't either. But it does give teams a meaningful way to alleviate some of that friction. Bold ideas that once required significant resources just to visualize can now be prototyped, iterated, and presented at a fraction of the cost and time.
More Options, Not Just Faster Options
This is the part worth being precise about, because the "AI makes things faster" framing undersells what's actually happening.
The real shift is in how many ideas make it to the table. When bringing a concept to life required a full production effort, teams naturally pre-filtered. You only invested in the ideas that felt safe enough to justify the work. The bold, strange, genuinely differentiated ideas got edited out before anyone outside the room ever saw them.
Now those ideas can be built out for consideration. Not shipped, not committed to, just made real enough to evaluate honestly. A speculative mobile experience, an unconventional campaign concept, a personalized customer journey that would have sounded too complicated to greenlight two years ago. Tools like Figma's recent AI suite, including Figma Sites and Figma Make, can take a rough concept to a working, interactive prototype in an afternoon. That changes what gets considered, not just how quickly things get built.
The ideas were never really the problem. It was the cost of making them visible. That cost has dropped significantly, and there's not much excuse left for leaving the interesting options off the table.
This article was originally published on Publicis CRMOne's LinkedIn page. Follow here.
