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- [00:01]
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Most marketing teams are scaling with AI right now it is the AI explosion. But the output is getting much, much worse for these marketing teams, not better. It's more volume, it's more channels, it's more agents running autonomously in the background doing the marketers work. But the problem is nobody owns what comes out the other end. The prompts the these teams are using are inconsistent. The agents are going off script, the brand sounds like everyone else because it's just a regurgitating the output for each of these marketers. Your buyer is asking AI, what product should I buy? And your company is not even part of the answer. And the creative you're creating is fast, but it's instantly forgettable. And here's the real problem. Everyone is having a debate externally about what marketing jobs will AI eliminate. And it's really the wrong debate. The more important question is what are the ones we actually need to make sure AI does an incredible job for our company? What AI jobs will exist in the next three to six months for marketeers that didn't exist 18 months ago. And I'm going to tell you the five roles you need to have in your future marketing team to make AI successful for you and your business. All of that and more on this episode of Marketing against the Grain.
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Here's a quick word from HubSpot. HubSpot helped Tumblr solve a big problem. They needed to move fast to produce trending content. But their marketing team was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign. Now they use HubSpot's customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in just seconds. The impact? Three times more engagement, double the content creation. Want to move faster like Tumblr? Visit HubSpot.com.
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Why is this happening now? What's changed? Well, I think three things are really coming, coming together at once to kind of set the scene for why I think a lot of marketing teams are struggling with AI. I think we are in the thing that I call the messy middle. Everyone can use AI to create things, but they're not using AI to create things of any real substance. Now first AI went agentic. We moved from tools you could prompt once to agents that run autonomously in the background. 24, 7. You see it all over your X feed, all over your LinkedIn feed. Marketing teams went from using AI to deploy an AI and that brings a whole set of different problems. Gartner says that 40% of enterprise applications will include task specific AI agents by the end of 2026. So it's not a prediction. It's already happening. You likely are using some of these agents yourself. So within the tools you use, there's much more autonomous agents being used. The second one is we know this. We've talked about this a lot on this show. AI source traffic has really exploded from these AI platforms like Chat T and Perplexity. It's increased anywhere between 5 to 600% across the last five months. We see this within our own data. The amount of traffic we're getting from these answer engines has grown over time. The way buyers discover brands has fundamentally changed. And most marketing teams are still running their SEO strategy like it was built for 20, 20. Third, the content volume problem has hit a wall. Right? 88% of marketers now use AI in their day to day work. But only a third of organizations have moved beyond experimentation into something that's actually scaling. Right. The gap is not tools, it's how you have people using AI. There's just this huge skill gap. There's this huge gulf in how you need to set up your team to be successful with AI. Our team put together an AI career strategy guide that uncovers the $100,000 AI jobs that no one is talking about. It also includes an Insider roadmap from AI experts and market data that shows 150% job growth in these emerging roles. Get it right now for free. So we're going to go through each of these five roles. I want to start with the prompt strategist role number one. This person is really the person that owns the entire team's prompt and infrastructure, right? They build the shared library of prompts, they train the team on how to use them. They're accountable for the consistency of the AI output across the whole function. You want to think of them as the person who stops your team going rogue with prompts. Now, the interesting thing is the delineation between someone who can prompt really well on your team and someone who cannot is huge. So if you have a prompt strategist that actually up levels the entire team provides them with a prompt library of how to get the best out of each model for the use cases that your company truly care about, it elevates the entire team all at once. Now here's real world proof companies using structured prompt engineering, they report 40% of your hallucinations and 60% better brand alignment in their AI comms. So that's not a small number when you're running AI across air team. You know the failure story that's happening in your team right now is every person on your team, they're prompting differently. Your content agent is using different instructions than your campaign agent. Your social copy sounds nothing like the email copy because there's different people prompted in different ways and the volume is going to keep going up. And so you start to see this huge disconnect between all of the output your team is producing and the customer experiences all of that. And it's incredibly jarring. The prompt strategist is the person who really is going to fix this before it cost you dearly in bringing that to life in your customer experience. So they would maintain and enable people on your prompt library. So you can see here, this is a prompt library. We have different marketing prompts. We can scroll around so your team can come in here, they can come in and they look to see what prompts they have for their different use cases. If I'm in SEO and aeo, I can come in and say, well, I want my AO content optimizer. There's a prompt. The prompt engineer will refine this and improve this. As they continue to see the input, we can see the model, we can see who owns the prompt, we can see how many times it's been used when it was last updated. So in this way, your prompt strategists, they own that prompt library, they own the integration of all these prompts, they own the improvement of their prompts because they can see all the output, they can make them better, and it's pretty cool. You can start to see how your team is using these things across all of their work. So that's number one, the prompt strategist. Let's get into number two. Number two is a big one, your agent ops manager. Now, this could actually be marketing wide or go to market wide. And this is really the most underrated of all five. As marketing teams, they're going to deploy fleets of AI agents and they're going to be agents for content, for prospecting, for campaign management, for aeo. Someone has to manage them. I'm telling you from experience, someone has to manage them. They have to monitor performance, they have to configure, catch these kind of failure states. They have to onboard new agents. Think of it as your chief agent officer, right? In today's world, we have a chief product officer. In the world, tomorrow we're going to have a chief agent officer. And I love this quote here from Joe Mora, who we've actually had on the show, the CEO of CrewAI. He says, just as DevOps reshaped software deployment, Agent Ops will reshape AI operations in 2026, a very important quote. Marketing ops is for the agentic era, right? That's what this role really is. Now let me give you a real example. So Unilever is actually one of the most advanced examples of this planet in the enterprise at scale. They've built what they call a brand DNA system. It's a training repository that ensures the AI models only source from approved brand voices, values and visual identity. So their Beauty AI studio produces assets up to 30% faster. And critically, they double key performance metrics like video completion rate and click through rate at the same time. So that's not just speed, that's a managed system. So that's Unilever have actually integrated AI and agentic ops into how they actually do their marketing. So without agentic ops, your agents are going to be running all over the place. No one's going to be watching them via a dashboard. They're going to have inconsistent output and probably going to break in ways you can't even imagine. So that's the second role, Agent Ops. Let's get into our third role. And that's an AI specialist. This is the one. We've covered a lot on this podcast before on this YouTube channel for how buyers find you has really changed forever. So in 2020 you would do this search, hey, best CRM for B2B SaaS companies and you would get your blue links. Today in 2026, you go to an answer engine and it gives you an answer. We know this is an important thing, right? ChatGPT has 800 million daily queries. We've seen AI traffic grow from answer engines by 527%. We know 40% of old searches now start with AI. 80% of brands have not even started their AEO story. This is a really important role to have on your team. You, you need to appear in these answer engines to even be in the conversation for the product or service that you offer. So right now the opportunity for you is only 20% of organizations have even started implementing this. That is a huge gap and you can still be a first mover to actually integrate AI into your marketing and into your business strategy.
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We'll be right back, but I want to tell you about another podcast I love. The DTC Pod, hosted by Ramon Berrios and Blaine Bolas, is brought to you by HubSpot Media. DTC Pod is a podcast about all things direct to consumer. Ramon and Blaine cover everything from starting, growing and optimizing e commerce stores and direct to consumer brands. They talk with founders, marketers, platforms, creators and marketing and growth agencies to cover topics like brand building, social media, influencer marketing, website, website conversion, paid media, Facebook ads, and much, much more. If you're interested in the stories behind your favorite consumer brands, this podcast is for you. They did an amazing show called Meta Ad secrets. How top DTC brands spend 300k monthly profitably. You can listen to the DTC pod wherever you get your podcast.
- [11:14]
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So that's number three. AEO number four is AI content strategy. This one is huge and another one that is a must have right now. Content via AI is an incredible winning strategy if you know how to do it at scale. So you still need a craftsperson to do this role. But wow, if you have a craftsperson that really knows AI, you can scale your content engine like a large team. Even if you were just a team of one. I really believe that. I think one person plus AI can actually be a content team of 10, 20 people right now. That's how good these models have gotten. But you need to be a craftsperson, you need to have real domain expertise within content. So the AI content strategy, it works with these AI agents to build your brand's entire content strategy. That's going to define the writing style. If you want to see how this works, look back at my latest video in cloud code where I showed you some of my agentic content system built right into cloud code. So it builds you a write in style. It actually builds you a style guide for your brand that the agents can read and follow. It's going to build you win in profile platform. So think of if you want to get really good at X articles or really good at substack, or really good at blogs, or really good at YouTube transcripts, you can actually build winning profiles for each of those platforms and the agent can follow that profile whenever it creates content for that platform. Because what works on LinkedIn probably doesn't work on YouTube, probably doesn't work in email. So you have to have these winning profiles per platform. And then the important part is you edit the agent's output to make it distinctive. And that is really important. Right? You are not copy and pasting what the agent does. And that's what a lot of marketing teams are doing today. And it's why all of their content sounds the same. You're getting first draft, you're getting ideas and then you are building on top of it. But because the agents have become so good and the models have become so good, they can do 70% of it and you do 30% but you have more time to make that 30% pretty incredible. And then because you are a native, you take that edit, you take what you did and you feed it back into the agents and the agents continue to get better over time. So the content strategy is making sure your agent team is unique to your brand. Does not sound like every single other person. And this is not a niche thing. Coca Cola are trying to go all in AI for a lot of their content. If Anyone saw their 2025 holiday campaign, it was a lot of AI integrated into it. They obviously got called out in 2024 for doing something pretty bad. It was really AI generated looks really bad. But the Coca Cola's own content team have really described the problem of using AI for content perfectly. The challenge, and that's maintaining brand voice at scale, knowing when the AI output is technically correct but emotionally wrong. Right. Trying to really find the craft within what AI is creating. And that's the job of the AI content strategist. Coca Cola is actually still trying to figure out the right balance. The brand that hires this role can be ahead of large brands like Coca Cola who, who are still trying to do that. And you compare that to Unilever who I talked about earlier on their chief of growth and marketing who said this isn't just about pushing out more content and that's what a lot of marketers are doing. Anyone can do that. It's about starting with a deep, deep understanding of people's needs and desires. If you go back to that video I mentioned, the cloud code, I talk about building an content profile for your audience to create content for them. So you have to start with deep understanding of people's needs and then you have to have the creativity to create campaigns that cut through. That's the content strategic mindset. Let's do the last one. AI Creative director and they are going to direct their agentic team to create great creative for the marketing team. They know what models to use for video or for copy or for image generation. They're going to maintain that distinctive voice for AI when it's handling the execution. Because just because you can create more content and creative assets with AI doesn't mean you should. Right? You should slow down and make sure the quality is really good. I'm going to talk a little bit about Unilever again. They built an internal design tool called Sketch Pro. It's an in house Design tool using VO3. Now this is a huge brand. Imagine all of the process you have to go through to get something done in Unilever and they were able to Use this tool to bring a concept to life for consumers in two hours. Not two weeks, not two months, two hours. And the reason it works is because humans are directing it. The AI creative director decides the concept, the brief, the aesthetics, and the AIs execute in that. And it's fine tuned for their needs. And what they found is content was created 65% faster with up to 55% cost savings. And their engagement metrics have actually gone up. And so they've built their own internal creative studio. Without an AI creative director, you're going to get the Coca Cola version. Go look to see their ad slop campaign. It's volume without any soul. So just because you can do fast doesn't mean you can do better. The key for this is if you have an AI creative director, you can do both speed and quality at the same time. And that's going to be really, really important. All right, so here's the five rules that I think are going to exist. These are the future marketing team. I think actually these five roles could probably do a lot of your marketing right now. This is a great quote from Andrew Yang. I won't replace workers. Workers who can use AI will replace workers who don't. I think we probably heard this before, but I think that's where we're going. And these five roles, the prompt strategist, the agentic ops manager, AI specialist, accounting strategist, AI creative director. So I think these five rules are going to be fundamentally important, critically important to marketing teams of the future. In fact, I think these five rules can probably do a lot of your marketing. And in every single one of these roles, AI is doing a large part of the execution. And the human oversight is making the agents in AI better and better and better. And so the roles exist to make sure AI executes well. And we're going into the era of where people are going to be skilled in managing AI and making the output from AI better. So that is the future of marketing teams. The future roles that we're going to see become more and more important. I hope this was helpful for you and I will see you all on the next episode of Marketing against the Green.
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Hey, everyone. You know, Kieran and I have been doing the podcast for a while now. We've been at this for a couple years. We love it. We could not be happier to be doing this, but we wanted to take things to the next level. We want to level up the impact we're having with marketing Instagram. So the next step of our journey is something we're really, really excited about we're going to launch the Marketing against the Grain newsletter and Marketing against the Grain newsletter is going to be amazing. If you are a marketing leader practitioner, you're in the trenches doing marketing every day. This is for you. We're going to deliver right to your email inbox and you're going to get all the behind the scenes frameworks, practices, tutorials from us, from guests we have on the show, and from people even beyond the podcast that we think are going to be helpful and really have an impact on your day to day, week to week doing marketing. You're going to love it. It is something we've been talking about for a while. We're really excited to have it out in the world. We've already got 100,000 marketers who are on this newsletter. Please join. It's completely free. We'd love to have you as part of the Marketing against the Grain community and it's easy. You can click the link in the description below or you can head to marketingagainstagrain. Com, Subscribe.