Jeff Brokaw

Stop Paying People to Copy Numbers Into Slides

Jeff Brokaw · CMO and Certified Chief AI Officer ·

Nobody should be paying someone to copy numbers into slides in 2026.

If half the week goes into building marketing reports, your team is doing work its software should already do. Then the deck lands and the CEO still has to ask what to do with the next dollar.

I would rather get one page before the weekly spend meeting: what changed, what we know about it, and which decision needs me. Keep the underlying numbers available. They do not need to occupy the meeting.

How do you automate marketing reporting for an executive?

Agree on the business outcome and its definition. Collect the same source data on a schedule. Check it before anyone writes an explanation. Then send a short brief with the movement, the limits of the evidence, the decision requested and the person who owns it. AI can draft that explanation from checked data. A person still has to approve the recommendation.

The order matters. If the CRM calls a form fill a lead and Sales only counts accepted opportunities, an automated report can repeat that disagreement faster. I wrote about the five systems that can all claim the same customer. Connecting them does not choose the measure that controls a budget decision.

The report I would want on my desk

Start with the decision. "Approve another $20,000 for this campaign" is a decision. "Paid search had a good week" is a mood.

The page needs five things:

  1. The business result. Qualified opportunities, orders, collected cash or another agreed outcome. Name the source, period and definition. If that result is delayed, show it as pending and use earlier signals for diagnosis, not as a substitute for revenue.
  2. What moved. Show the current period beside a comparable period and the relevant segment. A total can hide that one large customer renewed while new-customer demand fell.
  3. What might explain it. Separate things the systems recorded from explanations the team still needs to check. "The landing page changed on Thursday" is a fact. "The new headline caused the lift" needs a test.
  4. What is broken or missing. Late CRM updates, a tracking change, a small sample or a channel whose data has not arrived. Put the caveat beside the number it weakens.
  5. The next call. Continue, stop, change or investigate, with an owner and a date. Save the reason and the outcome so the next report does not start from memory.

That is a reporting format for someone who controls money or capacity. The analyst's working view can be as detailed as the job requires.

A real example of the decision hiding inside a total

At a prelaunch AI software company, the model bill reached $35,000 in one month. I could see the total. I needed to see which agents ran, what failed and what each job cost, so I built an internal command center.

Seeing the work by task let me make two different calls: route simpler jobs to models that passed the quality check, and price heavy use differently from a quick lookup. The electrical-distribution product case describes the rebuild and pricing. My public Control Center shows the type of operating view I mean. Its figures are synthetic, and it is not the client's dashboard.

Marketing has the same problem when a channel total hides which buyers arrived, what Sales accepted, and what the company earned. I would not move budget on a prettier platform return until those pieces were checked.

Buy less reporting work, not another pile of charts

For a small team, start with the systems you already pay for. Google Search Console's Performance report gives queries, pages, clicks and impressions. GA4's traffic acquisition report covers tracked acquisition and key events. Neither records your CRM's accepted opportunity or Finance's collected cash for you. Export those records with the same dates and definitions before you add a narrative layer.

If several accounts and ad platforms make collection the real burden, evaluate a connector product. Funnel and Supermetrics sell ways to bring marketing data into reporting destinations. Check the exact sources, refresh timing, access rights and ongoing cost against your stack. Buying a connector does not resolve the disagreement over what a lead or a sale means.

If the data is already clean but somebody still copies it into a deck, a scheduled workflow may be enough. n8n or Make can move a checked extract and a draft into the right person's review queue. The workflow should stop or flag a missing source, not quietly fill the gap with last week's number. Keep the source export attached so the reviewer can challenge the draft.

I would not buy a new platform until I knew which manual step it removed, who would own it and what a wrong report would cost. Sometimes the cheapest answer is a spreadsheet with scheduled exports and one person accountable for its definitions.

Give AI a narrower job

Let it compare approved periods, point to source rows and draft the plain-English brief. Ask it to mark a missing source and label a possible cause as a hypothesis. Keep private customer records inside an approved data and provider setup. Do not ask it to turn a traffic spike into a claim about revenue.

Google's own documentation makes the boundary clear. Search Console counts search impressions and clicks. GA4 key events are actions recorded in Analytics. They answer different questions from a sale accepted in the CRM or money received by Finance. The person approving a budget change needs the relevant records, not a confident paragraph that blends them.

The executive owns the decision. Marketing operations can own the report. Sales and Finance should confirm the stages and money they control. Software can recommend or draft within a bounded role; it should not silently approve the spend.

Put it in place this week

Take the report you already send and ask its recipient one question: "What decision is this supposed to help you make?"

If there is no answer, stop designing the dashboard. If there is, choose the smallest set of source fields needed for that decision, write the definitions and run the next edition as a one-page brief. Time the preparation, count disputed numbers and record whether the decision was made, deferred or rejected. Check the outcome on the date you agreed.

An automated report that saves hours and creates arguments over wrong figures has failed. A beautiful brief nobody uses has failed too.

Keep the people who can call bullshit on the numbers. Stop paying them to paste the numbers.

Frequently asked questions

What should an executive marketing report include?

The agreed business result, what changed in a comparable period, what the evidence can and cannot explain, any missing or late data, and the next decision with an owner and date. The detailed dashboard can sit behind the brief.

Can AI write a marketing report automatically?

AI can draft a report from checked source data and point out movements or missing fields. It cannot decide which system's definition controls a commercial outcome or prove that a campaign caused a sale from a before-and-after chart. A named person should review the evidence and approve the recommendation.

Which marketing reporting tool should a company buy first?

Buy only for an observed collection or delivery bottleneck. A small team may need scheduled exports and a spreadsheet. Multiple accounts can justify a connector such as Funnel or Supermetrics. n8n or Make may help deliver a checked brief. Compare setup effort, ongoing ownership and cost against the manual work removed.

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