Neville and Shel dig into a provocative Harvard Business Review article that argues most marketing teams are structurally unprepared for the speed and scale that agentic AI now enables. The bottleneck, the authors contend, isn’t the technology; it’s the operating model. Neville and Shel connect the piece to conversations FIR has been having for the past year: AI as orchestration rather than automation, professionals shifting from supervisors of tasks to directors of systems, and 2026 increasingly framed as “the year of the agent.”

At the center of the Harvard piece is the idea of a “brand code” — a machine-readable knowledge system that lets specialized AI agents continuously create, adapt, test, and optimize marketing in real time. Communications urgently needs its own equivalent: a “narrative code” containing executive voice profiles, message hierarchies, sensitive-topic guardrails, and escalation rules. Whoever builds it first, he warns, will inherit the agentic stack, and if marketing gets there first, comms will be stuck with a system never designed for crisis, controversy, or stakeholder complexity. The episode also includes some concrete examples and early thoughts on Hermes, Wispr Flow, and where human judgment still has to win.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 25.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Shel: Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode number 513 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville: I’m Neville Hobson. Over the past couple of years, we’ve heard countless conversations about how AI is changing marketing and communication. Most of those discussions tend to focus on tools — faster content creation, better personalization, workflow automation, synthetic media, analytics — all the things AI can supposedly do more quickly and at greater scale than humans. A new article in Harvard Business Review published last week takes the discussion somewhere much bigger.

Its argument is not simply that AI will improve marketing productivity. Its argument is that AI may fundamentally redesign how marketing organizations themselves operate. The article is called “Redesigning Your Marketing Organization for the Agentic Age,” and the authors argue that most marketing teams are structurally unprepared for the speed and scale AI now enables. The reasoning is interesting; we’ll look into this in a minute.

AI has already accelerated software engineering and product development dramatically. Products, updates, campaigns, and features are being developed and shipped much faster than before. But marketing organizations, they argue, are still largely built around sequential workflows, siloed teams, approval chains, meetings, handoffs, and coordination-heavy processes. So even when AI speeds up individual tasks, the organization itself still moves slowly.

In other words, the bottleneck isn’t necessarily the technology, it’s the operating model. What struck me reading this article is that in many ways it feels like the continuation of conversations we’ve already been having on FIR over the past year. About a year ago, Shel demonstrated some of the early agentic AI capabilities we were beginning to see emerge — systems that could move beyond simple chatbot interactions and actually take actions across workflows, tools, and platforms.

At the time, it felt experimental, slightly futuristic, and maybe just a glimpse of where things might be heading. Since then, we’ve repeatedly returned to related themes on the podcast: AI as orchestration rather than just automation, and managers becoming directors of systems rather than supervisors of tasks, to name but two. Recently, the wider communications industry has been framing 2026 as the year of the agent, a fundamental shift from generative AI, which creates content based on prompts, to agentic AI, which acts autonomously to achieve long-term goals. The rise of such autonomous agents requires a focus on agentic orchestration, with professionals acting as AI engineers who guide, manage, and audit these digital employees. As we discussed on this podcast last year, communication departments will adopt a hybrid structure where humans focus on high-level strategy and creativity while AI agents handle high-volume procedural communication tasks at machine speed.

We’re already seeing a marked impact on marketing and public relations. The Harvard piece explains how companies such as HubSpot and AWS have begun putting this model into practice. They say organizations are achieving measurable gains, with marketing materials adapted up to 98 times faster, unit costs reduced by 80%, and click-through rates increased up to 17 times. Research from BCG has demonstrated these benefits at scale.

Organizations embedding agentic AI into marketing workflows, the research has found, can achieve up to a threefold increase in ROI, campaign speed, and content volume. That’s why this Harvard article feels so interesting to me. It doesn’t contradict any earlier conversations; it complements them. It takes many of the ideas we’ve been discussing conceptually and places them inside a concrete organizational model. The authors propose something they call an agentic marketing organization — essentially a system where humans and AI agents work together continuously across multiple layers of activity.

At the center of this idea is what they describe as a brand code: a machine-readable knowledge system containing brand strategy, customer insights, messaging frameworks, business rules, governance structures, and operational guidance that both people and AI systems can understand and act upon. Once that foundation exists, specialized AI agents can continuously create, adapt, test, distribute, optimize, and report on marketing activity in real time. It’s a vision of marketing that starts to look less like a department and more like an operating system.

But what really caught my attention wasn’t the technology itself so much; it was the shift in the role of the marketer. Because beneath all the platform architecture and workflow diagrams is a much deeper question: if AI increasingly handles execution, what becomes the real value of marketers and communicators?

The article argues that value shifts away from production and toward judgment — setting intent, evaluating outputs, interpreting signals, shaping governance, and guiding how the system evolves. And that raises some fascinating questions for communicators. But first, Shel, your demo of those early agentic capabilities was about a year ago now. As I mentioned earlier, it felt experimental and slightly futuristic then. So what’s changed since then?

Shel: It feels like ancient history now. If I were to look at that, I’d probably shake my head and say, “my God, that’s pretty primitive.” The way it worked was, it took a screenshot of every site it visited and then acted on the screenshot. So it was a very slow and tedious process. The video that I shared, I edited out all of the waiting time for it to go through all of this, because it showed you everything. And those days are long gone.

That was clearly a demo. I don’t remember which of the AI models offered that — I think it was Anthropic — but it was just tedious and not all that functional. It did what it was supposed to do in the end, which was to create a spreadsheet with the information I’d asked for. It was some open-source spreadsheet that it used.

I ran a similar exercise just last week using Claude Cowork. And this was for a piece somebody in our sustainability department wrote. It was about two projects that had achieved world-first certifications for zero waste, which is kind of a big deal in the construction industry. It’s one of the biggest contributors to landfills and the like, the industry is.

So I’m looking to place this article. And what I did was, I told Claude Cowork that I wanted four subage...