A (0:01)

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.

B (1:37)

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.

A (2:17)

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.