Podcast Summary: Marketing Against The Grain

Episode: "Only 2 Types of Marketers Will Survive the AI Era (Which Are You?)"
Date: August 19, 2025
Hosts: Kipp Bodnar (HubSpot CMO), Kieran Flanagan (HubSpot SVP of Marketing)

Main Theme & Purpose

This episode explores the impact of AI on marketing teams and individual marketing careers. Kipp Bodnar shares his perspective on how AI will shape the future composition of marketing teams, moving from a specialist-driven structure to a more generalist and bifurcated model. The episode delivers tactical insight into the evolving skillsets required to thrive in the AI era, emphasizing the rise of two core types of marketers: AI-powered creatives and AI-proficient engineers.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Biggest Question: Will AI Shrink Marketing Teams?

[00:01 - 02:00]

Kipp addresses widespread anxiety among marketers and founders: "Are marketing teams going to shrink because of AI?"
Observes that this concern is rampant online (e.g., Reddit), reflecting fears of job loss and career uncertainty.
Sets out to define what future marketing teams will look like.

2. Marketing: A ‘Team of Teams’

[02:00 - 04:00]

Unlike sales and support (which often have uniform roles), marketing is a collection of varied specialists (e.g., product, brand, creative, demand gen, performance).
"In sales, you can sell or you can’t. In marketing, a brand marketer isn’t always a great performance marketer, and vice versa." — Kipp Bodnar [02:40]
Assembling and growing a marketing team is currently challenging due to heavy specialization.

3. Core Shift #1: From Specialists to Generalists

[04:00 - 06:30]

AI will empower marketers to do more, reducing reliance on extreme specialization.
“We’re going to start to see a move from specialization to generalization—where you really understand the craft of marketing, and you have AI to help you do much more.” — Kipp Bodnar [05:20]
Teams will be smaller, but individuals will cover multiple functions with AI as leverage.

4. Core Shift #2: The Rise of Two Marketer Archetypes

[06:30 - 13:00]

The essential split isn’t just “art and science” anymore; it’s “creative” vs “engineer-led” marketers, both powered by AI:
- Creative Marketers: Must produce exceptional storytelling and standout content to rise above “AI sludge”—the flood of mediocre, AI-generated material saturating channels.
- Engineer-Led Marketers: Excel at instrumenting AI across the customer journey, orchestrating scalable, personalized experiences (e.g., one-to-one personalized sales videos, multimodal AI agents on websites).
“AI is powering a lot of this, which means the human can spend more time on the craft.” — Kipp Bodnar [09:55]
Notable system: Personalized video outreach at scale, drawing from site behavior data, built by engineer-led marketers.
Unicorns will be those who can do both: “If you can do creative, but you’re also a very technical person, well—kudos to you. This is going to be a great time to build a marketing career.” — Kipp Bodnar [12:45]

5. Real-World AI-Driven Marketing Examples

[09:00 - 11:00]

Personalized, automated sales videos targeted by behavioral data.
Real-time, AI-powered landing pages adjusting to each user.
Multimodal AI agents capable of screen sharing and product walkthroughs as first sales touchpoints.
Advanced AI-driven email personalization, with conversion rates increasing by up to 500%.

6. Core Shift #3: Marketing’s Role Becomes More Important and Ubiquitous

[13:00 - 16:00]

AI will lead to a massive proliferation of software products and companies, democratizing tool creation.
“All of these new tools are going to need marketers.” — Kipp Bodnar [14:30]
While individual team sizes may shrink, the number of marketing teams/roles overall may rise—marketing becomes mission-critical for product differentiation in crowded markets.
“Maybe the size of marketing teams gets smaller, but the importance of marketing goes up.” — Kipp Bodnar [15:30]
Smaller teams may provide more opportunities to “practice the craft” as AI automates mundane tasks.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“If you can sell, you can sell. But in marketing, every person’s expertise is a little more siloed… That’s about to change.” — Kipp Bodnar [03:10]
“More and more, marketing is about, ‘Can you do the craft, powered by AI?’” — Kipp Bodnar [05:50]
“AI sludge” is the new content flood: “There’s more and more stuff out there, and a lot of it isn’t very good… It’s all going down the same stream.” — Kipp Bodnar [07:55]
“The best marketing teams will have folks living at the edge of creativity, and the edge of engineering.” — Kipp Bodnar [08:30]
On unicorns: “If you can do both creative and engineer, that is a unicorn. Kudos to you…” — Kipp Bodnar [12:45]
“Marketing teams may shrink, but you’ll have more marketing roles than ever, because the world is filling with products that need differentiation.” — Kipp Bodnar [15:35]

Timestamps for Important Segments

00:01 – Introduction & Main Question
02:00 – Structure of Marketing Teams vs. Other Departments
04:00 – Shift from Specialists to Generalists
06:30 – The Two Surviving Marketer Types
09:00 – Real Examples: AI-driven Personalization & Scale
13:00 – AI Proliferation and the Elevation of Marketing
15:30 – Summary: Smaller Teams, Bigger Impact

Conclusion

The future of marketing, according to this episode, is not about job extinction but about role evolution. The AI-powered marketer will be a generalist—either highly creative or highly engineering-focused (or exceptionally, both)—leveraging AI to cover more ground and operate more efficiently. Paradoxically, as AI fuels an explosion of new products, marketing’s importance will only grow, but so will the need for top-tier, standout marketing talent.

For marketers:

Focus on mastering the fundamentals of the craft.
Double down on either creative or technical skills (or both).
Embrace AI as a co-pilot, not a competitor.

“Hope you enjoyed this episode of Marketing Against the Grain… I’ll see you on the next episode.” — Kipp Bodnar [16:00]

Transcript

A (0:01)

The number one question I'm getting asked by founders and marketers is, will the size of every marketing team and every company shrink? Right. Our marketing team is going to get smaller because of AI. On this episode, I give you my thoughts on what I think the future marketing team looks like because of AI and break it down into three core things that I think will change on every marketing team. So if you want to know how to think about your marketing team in the future or to think about your marketing career in the future, this is the episode for you. The number one question I'm getting asked is, are marketing teams going to shrink in the future because of AI? Now, I think that's not specific to just marketers. Every team is wondering the same question. If AI is going to do more and more work, our teams going to get smaller. If you want to check out how people feel about this, you can go over to Reddit, hang out in the marketing forum, and it's a tough time for marketers. They're thinking jobs are decreasing, teams are going to get smaller. How should I think about this? Is a marketing career even worth it? Is AI just going to do the job well? Let me give you kind of three core takeaways for how I think marketing will evolve in the future and what a marketing team will even look like now. Number one, marketing is a very unique function because it is a team of teams. And let me be more specific about that. Marketing is made up of all of these specialists, right? You have specialists in product marketing, you have specialists in brand, you have creative specialists, you have demand gen specialists, performance marketer specialists, you have all of these different teams and they have specific knowledge on how to do their specific part of marketing. Now you compare that to other teams like sales. Sales kind of have a more unified kind of format, right? They have SDRs and BDRs and account executives, but they're all kind of selling. It's a very similar skill set. Whereas in marketing, a brand marketer kind of knows what they know, but they may not be very good at. Performance marketer, you might get a performance marketer who's not really great at product marketing, you might get a product marketer who, who can't really do brand. And so you have all of these collections of different specialists who kind of know their own piece of marketing and it's a really important piece. Whereas in sell, you can sell or you can sell, right? In customer success, you can kind of increase the usage of customers or you can't. In customer support, you can answer tickets or you Can't. So we're going to do three takes here or three kind of core parts to how marketing will evolve in the future because of AI. Number one, we're going to start to see a gravitation from specialists to generalists. Right. I think that is the thing we're going to see in marketing where I think marketing is going to become more and more so can you just do the craft of marketing powered by AI and that allows you to do more of these roles? It's not going to be so specialist. I think there is going to be specialization that I'm going to talk about, but it's going to be a lot less specialized than it is today. I don't think you're going to need a collection of different specialists for every different piece of marketing. And that actually makes marketing kind of challenging because it's really hard to kind of grow that team because you're constantly having to look for these people with very unique and specific domain expertise. So that's really, number one, I think we're going to start to see a move from specialization to generalization where you really understand the craft of marketing and you have AI to help you do much more marketing than you were able to do in the future. You're able to cover off lots of these different roles because you just understand the core nuts and bolts of marketing, the core craft of marketing and. And you can do it all with AI. So number one, we're going to go with more generalization. We're going to see this move from specialization to generalization. That's number one on the future of marketing team. Number two, I'm going to show a quick graphic for this. This is the, the core trend. Then if there's going to be this move to generalization, well, does that mean one person can do all the roles? I think it breaks down via this kind of graphic where you have people who have to operate at the kind of polar opposites of what we used to say about marketing. What do we always say about marketing? Marketing is art and science. Marketing is art and science. It's creative performance marketing. And I think what's going to happen is the best marketing teams are going to have people at the edges of each of those things. So they're going to have to be incredibly creative to make sure that their market stands out above the noise. Because what's happened because of AI? Well, there's just been this thing called AI sludge, which means there's more and more and more stuff being created. A lot of it not very Good. But it's all going down the same stream. It's all going down the same channels. And oh, by the way, these channels are becoming less and less impactful because they're just crammed full of more and more AI generated content. Through your social feeds, through Google Search, we're seeing more and more of that traffic go towards AI overviews and into the AI assistance. And so what we're seeing is less places to distribute our content and less places to distribute our marketing and much more of it. And so you have to be really, really great storyteller, a great creative create things that really are just full of taste and can stand out above all of this sludge and can elevate you above the noise. And to do that, I don't think good enough is, is going to be good enough anymore. You really have to be at the outer edges of creative and really hone your skills there real quick. If you're a marketer who wants to survive in an AI world, we've got the ultimate toolkit for you. We've got a list of 20 prompts that you can use to create high quality content across any channel. These prompts are tried and true from a founder who runs their entire business solely on AI. Get it right now, scan the QR code or click the link in description. Now let's get back to the show. And on the opposite end, I think we become engineer led and you have people who think in that way and they're again at the outer edges of how they do that, which means they are very, very good because they're going to figure out how to integrate AI across all of the things marketing do, inclusive of my customer journey. Let me give you a couple of examples. But this is really how marketing is going to work in the future, right? You have your incredibly creative people and then your incredibly engineer led people and what they do. I watched the video just before I came on from one of our team. One of the things that they figured out is how to actually scale personalized videos from sales reps in really interesting ways. They actually personalize the video to things that that person has done on your website. They're able to ingest the data, personalize the video in real time, have a personalized landing page and actually present something from the salesperson talking to that exact prospect. Now that's an example of a engineer led use case where someone has really figured out how to integrate AI build this incredible system to do something at scale. They're going to figure out how to turn your website into Your best salesperson via multimodal agents. Multimodal agents means that you can go to a website, conversate with an agent, share your screen with the agent, and then the agent could be your first salesperson. They're going to figure out how to integrate personalization across all of your email. We've done that. We've seen increases of up to 500% and conversion rates. Right. You're going to have these incredibly engineer led people to figure out how to instrument AI across your customer journey and across all of these kind of human led tasks that we do. But we're going to do them in the future via AI enablement. So I think marketing is still going to be, I like to call it more creative and engineer led versus art and science. But I think AI is in the middle. So AI is powering a lot of this, which means that the human can spend more time on the craft of marketing and they can spend more time on the craft on the creative side. And I think those creative folks can do many more roles. They can do brand and product marketing. All of the roles that require you to do incredible storytelling, to bring your brand to life, to bring your product to life. They can do incredible creative via these AI tools, video, audio, imagery. So I think you'll have generalists who exist in the creative bucket. And again, they're powered by AI. AI is in the middle powering all of this stuff. And then you'll have your engineer led folks. And your engineer led folks are really the people who can instrument the customer journey, the go to market for the customer, bring it to life in a very contextual and personalized way, but can also figure out how to do these AI scale tasks. Like the example I give you where we're able to scale personalized videos on behalf of the sales team. That's how I think marketing teams go from specialization to generalization. And then when they go to generalization, there's two core buckets. There's going to be the folks who are incredibly creative, powered by AI can do much more. The people who are very engineer led, powered by AI can do much more. And I think the unicorns are going to be people who can do both. Right? You can do creative, but you're an engineer, very technical person. Well, kudos to you. This is going to be a great time to build a marketing career. And then the third thing is to end on a really optimistic note. I think there's going to be a ton more companies and so maybe marketing teams shrink, but there's a ton more marketing roles, because guess what really matters in the era of lots and lots of software? Because AI is going to help people build more amazing software, more amazing tools. It's going to really help democratize how you can bring things to life because you have a lot of AI coding assistance and these kind of different AI tools that help you really build software. Well, what's going to really happen there is all of these new tools are going to need marketers to, to help market those products. And I do think there's gonna be real importance on marketing because you're gonna have to be really, really good to break through all of the noise and competition. So I think actually marketing elevates and becomes even more important than it is today because every space gets more and more crowded. And so really that's how I think marketing is going to evolve and that you're going to go from a lot of specialists today to generalist powered by AI. And they're going to break into two core buckets where you have people who are incredibly creative, very great storytellers, able to bring things to life through text and video and imagery. They're going to be powered by AI so they can really spend a lot of time on the craft and figure out how they can find the leverage to break through. All that noise, all that noise you see on LinkedIn, all the noise you see in X, all the noise you see across all of your social feeds. What do you actually notice there? You notice the things that are really, really remarkable and speak to you as a customer. Then you're going to have the people who are incredibly engineer led, really great at building things at scale, really great at building a contextual and personalized customer journey for your prospects and your customers. And they're going to be able to do much more because they're powered by AI. And then we're going to have more, probably will have smaller marketing teams, but more of them. Because marketing gets elevated, it becomes more important because we get lots and lots more products, lots more software, and we probably get lots more niche products to actually market to all of these customers. And maybe the size of marketing teams gets smaller, but actually the importance of marketing goes up, there's some increase in opportunities. And actually smaller marketing teams can be more fun at times because you can just really practice the craft. So maybe we actually all end up practicing the craft more and more as AI takes up a lot of the more mundane work that we used to have to do. So that's my take on the future of marketing teams in the AI era. Hopefully this is helpful. If you are one of those people thinking, what should I do with my marketing team? Should my marketing team be smaller, bigger? Is my marketing career going to be okay? Or you want to get into marketing? Like, how should I think about this? That's how I'm currently thinking about it. Hope you enjoyed this episode of Marketing against the Green. I will see you on the next episode.