More output, more channels, more speed — but with less budget and fewer resources. For many Communications, Marketing, and Brand teams, this is already the reality.
The key efficiency question is no longer, “How can we simply get more done with fewer people?” It is, “Which work should no longer be handled by highly skilled Communications and Brand teams?”
Under cost pressure, the greatest opportunities for impact and efficiency come from systematically reducing the time spent searching for content, recreating materials, formatting documents manually, managing approval cycles, and handling recurring service requests.
And this pressure is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. According to Gartner, marketing budgets in 2026 average 7.8% of company revenue and remain at low levels. 56% of CMOs say they do not have enough budget to execute their strategy, while 54% say they lack the necessary resources. At the same time, expectations around growth, speed, and the use of AI continue to increase.
At many companies, cost pressure is not only reflected in smaller budgets. Teams are getting smaller, agency support is being reduced, and projects need to be prioritized more carefully.
That is why this article looks at often-overlooked cost drivers and four levers that can make communications work more efficient and scalable.
The hidden cost center: Searching, recreating, and correcting
Efficiency starts by eliminating unnecessary work
Less operational work creates space for strategy, storytelling, and leadership
Under cost pressure, less friction matters more than more output
Cost pressure quickly shifts attention to major budget items. Less visible are the many small sources of friction in day-to-day work.
Each task may seem manageable on its own. Together, however, these requests consume exactly the capacity that is needed elsewhere.
The same issue appears in everyday work with Microsoft Office. Nearly 60% of office workers spend at least 30 minutes each month simply searching for existing slides and documents. When they cannot find what they need, 65% recreate content from memory. At the same time, only 69% of externally distributed documents and presentations comply with brand guidelines.
What initially looks like a template or branding issue is therefore, above all, a structural efficiency problem.
When fewer resources are available, simply making existing processes faster is not enough. Communications work needs to be organized so that highly skilled employees spend as little time as possible dealing with operational friction.
That requires four key decisions.
Strategic positioning, sensitive messaging, advisory work, storytelling, and crisis communications require experience, context, and judgment. These responsibilities should not be handed over to AI or automation. But not every content update or standard request requires the same level of human expertise.
Ask deliberately — which tasks create strategic value, and which ones end up with Communications simply because that is how things have always been done?
This can also mean producing less. Fewer campaign variations that are barely distinguishable from one another, fewer one-off solutions for individual departments or regions, and less content where the additional value does not justify the additional effort.
If something is needed regularly, it should not have to be created from scratch every time.
This includes current company information, approved copy blocks, boilerplate language, reusable narratives, presentation modules, brand assets, and templates. Clear content governance ensures that employees know what is current and where to find it.
This is where efficiency and branding directly connect. When current content and brand standards are available from the start, or can be assembled automatically with just a few clicks, teams save time during creation while also reducing revisions and approval cycles later.
Communications and Brand teams should not become bottlenecks for standard tasks.
Sales, HR, Leadership, and business functions need reliable access to approved content, templates, and guidelines. Ideally directly within the applications they already use. This allows employees to handle standard tasks themselves without involving Communications every time they create a presentation, prepare a document, or update company information.
This reduces ad hoc requests and takes pressure off central teams without giving up control over content or the brand.
AI creates additional opportunities to improve efficiency. According to Gartner, 15.3% of marketing budgets in 2026 are already being allocated to AI initiatives. At the same time, only 30% of surveyed marketing organizations say they have reached a mature level of AI readiness. Gartner specifically points to the importance of processes, governance, and organizational maturity.
That is why the first question should not be, “Where can we use AI?” It should be, “What work do we actually want to keep doing?”
Only then does automation make sense. Otherwise, AI may simply accelerate a process that was already unnecessarily complicated.
That is where the opportunity lies for Communications and Brand leaders. Less time spent searching, recreating content, handling standard requests, and managing revisions creates room for the work where human expertise truly matters.
Cision’s Inside PR 2026 also shows why these skills remain important in the age of AI. 59% of surveyed PR and communications professionals name storytelling and content creation as their most important skills. At the same time, 48% see AI and automation as the biggest opportunity for their teams. Slow approvals and organizational structures are among the factors that limit agility.
Technology and human communications expertise are therefore not in conflict. At its best, technology creates the space that strong communications work requires.
The practical opportunity lies in everyday work — presentations, documents, emails, recurring content, and the processes surrounding them.
When approved content, current templates, brand guidelines, and automation are available directly in Microsoft 365, Communications and Brand teams spend less time searching, providing materials, explaining processes, and making revisions. That is exactly where empower® comes in. Not only to protect brand standards, but also to make communications work easier to scale and less dependent on manual support across Microsoft 365.
Under cost pressure, this becomes a management question. Which tasks still deserve your team's time? Which can be standardized? What can other departments handle themselves? And which work can technology such as AI eliminate altogether?
Achieving more impact with fewer resources does not mean making people work faster and faster. It means organizing communications work so that their time is spent where it makes the greatest difference.
If you want to identify where processes in Microsoft 365 can be simplified, standardized, or automated, talk to our experts.