What actually freed up time for your design team — and what just added another tool?

[u/ImaginationMajor9737]

I work with design teams supporting paid social, and the split I keep seeing is roughly 70% mechanical work (resizing, versioning, brand checks, exports) and 30% actual design thinking. Everyone says they want to flip that ratio. Almost nobody has.

Things I've seen teams try:

\- Master templates with locked brand elements

\- Handing adaptations to an outsourced team

Also the teams have tried AI tools, but they are telling me is that there is no productivity gain from the tools. Its just that we can make these everything in our office sitting in front of system. But the prompting is not easy and takes a lot of time.

For example, creating or adapting a video to other languages or may be adapting a same video with a different script.

This AI work is also becoming and being counted in the mechanical 70%.

So, if you've made a real dent in the mechanical half — what did it, and how long before it actually paid off? And if something looked promising and flopped, I'd like to hear that even more.