Short version: After six months using AI tools as our primary production method — not as supplements to a traditional workflow, but as the actual workflow — the quality concerns I started with aren’t the issue anymore. The bottleneck was platform sprawl. Fixing that recovered more time than switching to AI in the first place.
Why We Decided to Switch
Our team produces marketing videos for product launches, social campaigns, and client demos. Until last year, that meant either hiring out ($3,000–$6,000 per finished piece) or spending two to three weeks on an internal production cycle for anything longer than 30 seconds.
When I started testing AI video tools in mid-2025, the output quality wasn’t quite there. By early 2026, something had shifted. Models like Sora 2 and Kling 3.0 were producing footage I’d actually use — not as filler content, but as the main deliverable. That’s when I committed to rebuilding our workflow around them.
The Subscription Problem Nobody Warns You About
The first mistake I made was subscribing to platforms separately. Sora 2 for product demos. Kling for short-form social. ElevenLabs for voiceovers. Stable Diffusion for still images. Four platforms, four billing cycles, four sets of credentials, four different UX paradigms to learn.
Managing this across a three-person team was genuinely painful. Figuring out which account still had credits, which subscription was about to renew, which export format was compatible with which editing tool — this administrative layer is what nobody mentions in the “AI replaces video production” conversation. I’d estimate my content manager was spending 30–35% of her time on platform logistics rather than actual creation.
The problem wasn’t that any single platform was bad. It was that managing five of them had quietly turned content creation into operations management.
Here’s what the fragmented approach actually looked like compared to a consolidated setup:
| Fragmented Stack | Consolidated (GenMix AI) | |
| Platforms to manage | 4–5 | 1 |
| Monthly billing cycles | 4–5 | 1 |
| Time on logistics | 30–35% | ~5% |
| Models accessible | 4–5 | 30+ |
| Shared credit pool | No | Yes |
What Consolidation Actually Looks Like in Practice
About three months in, I moved our entire workflow to GenMix AI, which brings 30+ models — including Sora 2, Veo 3.1, Kling 3.0, Seedance 1.5, GPT-4o Image, and Flux Kontext — under one subscription and a shared credit pool.
The credit model means we’re not locked into any single provider. If Sora 2 delivers a better result for a product walkthrough, we use Sora 2. If Seedance produces a better rhythm-synced clip for Instagram, we switch. Same account, same billing, same export workflow. That shift alone recovered most of the time we were losing to account switching.
One honest trade-off: you give up some of the granular controls you get when working directly inside each platform’s native app. For roughly 90% of our production work that hasn’t mattered. But it’s worth knowing going in, especially if your team relies on advanced prompt-level settings for specific output types.
Switching between text-to-video, image-to-video, and image generation doesn’t require logging out of one product and into another. Two weeks in, we’d stopped dreading the handoffs entirely.
Which Models We Use and For What
After six months of actual production work — not demos, real deliverables — here’s how the models split across our workflow:
- Sora 2 — product demos and explainer sequences. Camera movement is the strongest feature: you can direct a virtual shot with real precision. The 20-second clip limit means longer pieces still require stitching, which adds a step, but the control is worth it for anything customer-facing.
- Kling 3.0 — short-form social. Fast turnaround, reliable across 9:16, 1:1, and 16:9. We used this for a product launch series last month and it handled 22 variations in under a day.
- Seedance 1.5 — anything that needs to sync with audio. The rhythm-aware rendering is genuinely different from other models; it’s not just a timing trick.
- Nano Banana Pro — brand asset generation where consistency across a batch matters. Accepts up to four reference images to maintain character and visual style. This replaced most of our static design outsourcing.
- Veo 3.1 — hero content and quarterly campaigns where render quality outweighs turnaround time. We don’t use this for quick-turn work; it’s the right tool when the output needs to anchor a campaign.
We’ve run the same brief through two models back to back to compare output. That kind of A/B testing only takes minutes when you’re not switching accounts to do it.
The Actual Numbers, Six Months In
We track projects in a shared tool, so these come from actual project records, not estimates:
- Cost per finished piece: Down from $3,000–$6,000 (outsourced) to under $200 in credits for comparable quality output
- Internal cycle time: 30–35% faster on average for campaigns that previously required multi-week timelines
- Logistics overhead: Content manager now spends roughly 5% of time on platform logistics, down from 30–35%
- Model comparison speed: We can test two models on the same prompt in less time than it used to take to log into a second platform
We run 8–12 production projects per month across a three-person team. The efficiency gains hold at that volume — I’d expect them to compound further at higher output.
What I’d Tell Someone Starting This Now
Don’t evaluate AI video tools based on model output quality in isolation. By 2026, every major model can produce content you’d actually publish. The decision that matters is whether you’re building a consolidated workflow or a fragmented stack that grows more expensive to manage as your volume increases.
If I were starting over: run one real deliverable through a consolidated platform before making any other decisions. Not a test prompt — something you’d actually publish. The quality difference between platforms has narrowed enough that workflow efficiency is now the actual variable. Most teams I’ve seen are still optimizing the wrong thing.
