AI-Ready CMO
AI users are working up to 90 minutes longer a day, one study says
ActivTrak tracked 9,140 knowledge workers. Fewer meetings, longer days, shorter stretches of focus.
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Made it to Friday.
Remember the pitch? AI was going to hand you back your afternoons. Somebody should tell the calendar.
ActivTrak, which sells workplace analytics software, looked at activity data from 9,140 knowledge workers across 467 enterprises between April 1 and September 25. Employees who use AI worked 8.42 to 9.08 hours a day. Those who don't, 7.58 hours. That's up to 90 minutes a day.
Heavy users, meaning more than 45 minutes across at least five sessions a day, averaged 37.8 minutes per focus session, against 48.2 for light users. They switched apps 1.09 times an hour, against 0.95 for non-AI users, and worked about 18 minutes more after hours. They spent 3% of their active time in meetings, against 5% for non-AI users.
Where the AI sits seems to matter, too: employees using it inside their main applications switched apps substantially less, ActivTrak says.
So fewer meetings, longer days and more hopping between apps. That's a strange shape for a productivity gain.
It's a correlation, and ActivTrak sells the software that measured it. People who already work long days may be the ones who pick up AI first. And the gap runs from about 50 to 90 minutes, so 90 is the top of the range.
Its blog says "associated," but its research chief says AI "contributes to longer workdays," per TechRadar. Activity data can't show that.
But one line in its write-up deserves your attention. The company says time savings may "get redirected into additional work" without clear workload boundaries.
Marketing teams know this one. If your team writes the brief in 20 minutes instead of two hours, the other 100 minutes don't come with instructions. The work fills them, and next quarter the plan assumes the new pace.
I'd want that decision made before the savings arrive, and said out loud.
The last time AI saved your team a day, who decided what they did with it?
ALSO TODAY
OpenAI appears to be building a dashboard showing businesses their ChatGPT mentions and clicks, spotted by one observer and not yet announced, PPC Land reports.
AI is speeding up recruitment and putting agency fees under pressure, though recruiters disagree on what comes next, CNBC reports.
Google's new Data Manager beta in Analytics warns that running the same pipeline through Analytics and Google Ads can count conversions twice, PPC Land reports.
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TALK ON THE MARKET
Hiten Shah, founder of Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics, on who's getting ahead:
Maybe. ActivTrak's numbers say they may be figuring it out on longer days. Worth finding out whether your power users are ahead or just still at their desks.
NUMBERS MATTER
89%. Growth in U.S. AI Overview appearances in Adthena's count, from 304 million in August 2025 to 575 million in August 2026, per SEJ.
Adthena sells ad tracking for Google and ChatGPT, and SEJ notes the report doesn't say whether the set of queries stayed the same across both years. Use it for direction. Don't put it in a board deck as a growth rate.
TRY THIS TODAY
Find out where the time AI saved actually went.
Here is the workflow, the tools, the steps and our time data: identify the bottlenecks, the manual touchpoints and where our documented process and the actual data disagree.
Then list the three changes that would free the most hours and do the arithmetic on each.Paste in: one workflow's process doc, its tool list and a project management or time tracking export. You get back: the bottlenecks, the places your process and your data disagree and three changes with hours saved. The full Marketing Workflow Optimization Audit adds integration options, pricing and cost estimates.
CMO CORNER
Your job is to create clarity and then disappear without chaos.
AI gives your team capacity, and capacity without instructions turns into more work. It never shows up on a calendar. It happens because every open hour looks like room for one more thing.
Clarity here means saying what the saved time is for. Pick one: more output, better output, or people going home on time. You can't have all three this quarter, and if you don't choose, the workload chooses for you.
Run it like this. Open next Monday's team meeting with one question: where did last week's saved time go? Write the answers down. Then state the rule for the quarter and name one thing the team stops doing.
Then leave them to it. Check the rule at the end of the month, and stop asking for daily updates. A team that knows the rule shouldn't need you to enforce it.
TOOL UPGRADE
Three tools for getting the hours back:
Reclaim — best for distributed marketing teams with heavy meeting loads that want deep work blocks protected automatically. Try Reclaim here →
VoiceOS — best for executives losing hours to small, frequent actions and the context switches around them. Try VoiceOS here →
MarketerHire — best for lean teams plugging a specific skill gap without full-time headcount. Try MarketerHire here →
→ We have 300+ curated, filtered, and categorized AI tools in our directory. Browse to find the best ones that help your marketing team.
LEARN THIS
The Operational Debt Scorecard is our self-assessment for surfacing where your team is losing time, clarity and momentum. It scores coordination overload, approval bottlenecks, execution debt, tool sprawl and broken feedback loops. Use it when the team feels busier since AI arrived and you can't say why.
First step this week: score it yourself, then have one team member score it separately, and compare. Anything from 66 up counts as high or critical debt.
→ We publish workshops, courses, guides, manuals, and more on AI marketing for free. Browse our learning resources for free.
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