Where is this all headed?

AI is collapsing marketing teams into 2 roles

I spend a lot of time talking to CEOs and founders about AI right now. Not in the abstract, but in very practical terms. How should we structure the team? What roles still matter? What should we actually replace?

Underneath all of those questions is a bigger one they’re really trying to answer: what does a marketing team even look like in an AI-first world?

So here is my honest take:

Most marketing organizations are still built around execution. The assumption is that growth comes from producing more. More campaigns, more content, more output.

That logic made sense when execution was the constraint.

It’s not anymore.

I’ve talked about this a ton already in the newsletter but execution is becoming abundant. You can spin up campaigns faster than ever, generate endless variations of content, and move from idea to launch in a fraction of the time it used to take. And yet, most teams aren’t getting better. They’re just producing more.

Because the constraint didn’t disappear. It moved from execution to decision-making and system design.

Once you understand that, the structure of the team starts to change.

The two roles everything collapses into

If you strip it down, marketing teams are collapsing into two core functions: strategists and builders.

Strategists decide what should exist. Builders make it real.

That sounds simple, but in practice, these are completely different skill sets.

A strong strategist is not just someone with ideas. They have judgment, they have taste. They can take a messy market, unclear positioning, and scattered inputs and turn it into a clear direction. Turn it into a story and a brand that stands out. When they hand something off, it is obvious what needs to be built and why it should work.

You can usually tell the quality of a strategist by how much interpretation is required after they speak. If the team leaves with more questions than clarity, the strategy isn’t done.

A strong builder thinks in systems, not tasks. They don’t just launch campaigns, they design how campaigns get launched. They connect tools, define workflows, and make sure that once something works, it can run again without starting from scratch.

The easiest way to spot a weak builder is that everything depends on them. The easiest way to spot a strong one is that the system runs without them constantly intervening.

As much as everyone wants the opposite to be true - these aren’t the same person. Sure there might be some crazy unicorn out there, but the best storytellers, brand builders are rarely the best operationally and vice versa.

Where performance actually comes from

Most teams blur these roles together and that’s where things start to break.

You get strategists who are pulled into execution, so they never think deeply enough about direction. Or you get builders who are asked to make decisions they don’t have the context for, so they default to whatever is easiest to ship.

The result is a lot of activity without real progress.

What actually drives performance is the interaction between the two.

The strategist defines a clear direction. Not a list of ideas, but a point of view on what should win and why. The builder translates that into a system that can execute consistently. Once that system is live, both roles stay in the loop. The strategist refines direction based on what’s working. The builder tightens the system so it runs faster and with less friction.

Over time, the loop gets tighter. Ideas move faster, feedback comes quicker, and the system compounds.

The structure looks more like a feedback loop than a pipeline:

Direction → system → output → feedback → iteration

Most teams are still operating like a pipeline. That’s why they feel slow even when they’re busy.

How you know if this is working

This is also where measurement starts to change.

Strategists shouldn’t be judged by how much they produce. They should be judged by how often their thinking leads to something that actually works. Are the ideas translating into performance? Is the direction getting clearer over time? Is the team moving faster because decisions are easier to make?

Builders shouldn’t be judged by how busy they are. They should be judged by how much leverage they create. Are campaigns getting to market faster? Is there less manual work over time? Does each new campaign get easier to launch than the last? Is the system improving automatically from what we are learning.

If both roles are doing their job, you start to see a few things happen:

• Time from idea to execution shrinks

• Fewer things get launched, but more of them work

• The system improves with each cycle instead of resetting

That’s usually the signal that you’re building something that compounds.

Where this breaks

Most teams don’t fail because they misunderstand the model. They fail because they over-index on one side.

If you lean too far into strategy, you end up with good thinking that never ships. The team spends more time discussing ideas than executing them.

If you lean too far into building, you get efficient execution of the wrong things. Systems get more complex, but results don’t improve.

And then there’s the assumption that AI replaces both roles. It doesn’t. AI makes good strategy scale faster and good systems run more efficiently. It doesn’t decide what matters or how things should be built.

There’s also a timing issue that shows up as companies grow. Early on, one person can play both roles because speed matters more than structure. At some point, that breaks. If you don’t separate the roles, everything bottlenecks around a few people. If you separate them too early, you slow down before you have enough signal to guide decisions.

Most teams get that transition wrong.

What this means going forward

This isn’t just a hiring change. It’s a shift in how you think about your growth engine.

Your advantage is no longer your ability to produce more. It’s your ability to decide what’s worth building and to build systems that improve over time.

Most teams are still asking how to do more marketing.

The better question is how to build a system that does marketing for you.

When execution is effectively free, the only thing that compounds is good decisions and the systems that carry them forward.

I could also be completely wrong here and we all end up building a machine that ends up taking over the world while we try to find meaning in our new roles as humans.

Thanks for reading,

Adam