Walmart now has 73% of its marketing investment AI-enabled. Not AI-adjacent. Not AI-informed. AI is touching targeting, bidding, media placement and dynamic creative across nearly three-quarters of their spend.
But the insight is not the number. It is how they got there. Digiday's Future of Marketing Briefing reports that the brands winning at AI all share one trait: they started with process mapping, not tool selection.
The Home Depot carved out dedicated "Transformation Thursdays" to map end-to-end workflows before touching a single AI tool. They documented how complex their processes had become, then simplified before automating. Coca-Cola started with a few use cases, proved they worked, then embedded AI into the entire marketing process from insights through to performance tracking.
The brands that started by buying AI tools are still running pilots. The brands that started by understanding their own workflows are running at scale.
Why it matters
Most marketing teams in Australia are in the tool-buying phase. They have ChatGPT seats, an AI copywriting subscription, maybe a predictive analytics vendor. What they do not have is a clear map of which workflows those tools should replace, augment or leave alone.
Of Walmart's marketing investment is now AI-enabled across targeting, bidding, placement and creative
The lesson from Walmart, Home Depot and Coca-Cola is not "buy more AI." It is "know your workflow before you automate it." When you plug AI agents into siloed, undocumented processes, you automate the chaos. You get faster wrong decisions, not better ones.
What clients often want when they ask for AI is actually for their workflow to be more efficient. The technology is the easy part. The hard part is admitting your processes have accumulated years of workarounds, handoffs and redundant approvals that no one has mapped since they were created.
What to do about it
Block out half a day this month to map one marketing workflow end-to-end. Pick your most expensive or most time-consuming process. Document every step, every handoff, every approval. Then identify which steps are repetitive, rules-based and low-context. Those are your automation candidates. The steps that require judgment, nuance or brand taste stay human. That map is your AI strategy. Everything else is just tool shopping.
