AI Accelerates Coding, but Not the Full Software Delivery Process

WHO:

Fast Company - Gabe Rogol, CEO of Demandbase, wrote about how AI is changing product development and marketing operations.

Fast Company - Companies’ engineering, marketing, sales, public relations, creative, executive, and legal teams are involved in launching software products and campaigns.

TechRadar - The article says developers are seeing faster code generation but continue to face challenges elsewhere in the software development lifecycle.

WHAT:

Fast Company - A McKinsey analysis of almost 300 publicly traded companies using AI in software development found that top performers reported 16% to 30% improvements in time to market, productivity, and customer experience, and software quality gains of 31% to 45%.

Fast Company - Almost 60% of marketers said they use AI multiple times a week; fewer than 10% said they had started capturing value across workflows, and 28% said their companies were significantly revamping marketing teams and workflows around AI.

Fast Company - AI can accelerate individual marketing tasks, but coordination among messaging, content, website updates, advertising, PR, sales enablement, and performance teams can still take weeks.

Fast Company - Rogol identifies quarterly campaign calendars, agency retainers, and fragmented workflows as traditional marketing structures under pressure as product and campaign volumes increase.

TechRadar - The article reports that AI is speeding up code generation but is not yet improving productivity across the entire software development lifecycle.

TechRadar - The headline states: “Faster code is not the same as better software delivered sooner.”

WHY:

Fast Company - Product development was traditionally treated as the time-intensive stage, so marketing plans, staffing, agency contracts, and approvals were organized around product launch schedules.

Fast Company - Faster product development shifts the bottleneck to bringing products to market; existing marketing coordination structures can slow launches even when software is ready.

Fast Company - Quarterly calendars and retainers were designed for predictable campaign timing and volume, while frequent product releases make those assumptions less suitable.

HOW:

Fast Company - Rogol says organizations should distinguish decisions requiring human judgment—such as target markets, product positioning, customer needs, and creative direction—from coordination that AI can manage.

Fast Company - Agentic marketing systems can work from an objective or brief, determine and execute a sequence of actions, learn from results, and adjust.

Fast Company - Rogol says software could coordinate work across teams and systems after people make high-level decisions.

AI is speeding up software development, but the gains don’t always carry through to a faster product launch. A McKinsey analysis of nearly 300 publicly traded companies found that top performers using AI in software development reported improvements of 16% to 30% in time to market, productivity and customer experience, alongside software quality gains of 31% to 45%. Yet marketers face a coordination bottleneck: while almost 60% use AI multiple times a week, fewer than 10% say they’re capturing value across workflows. Bringing messaging, content, advertising, public relations and sales teams together can still take weeks. Demandbase CEO Gabe Rogol says quarterly campaign calendars, agency retainers and fragmented processes were built for slower, predictable launches. He recommends leaving decisions about customers, positioning and creative direction to people, while AI coordinates tasks across teams, learns from results and adjusts. Faster code alone, however, does not guarantee better software delivered sooner.