I defined a new marketing role in 2024. Eighteen months later, even that framework is too small.
In September 2024, I wrote what I thought was a forward-looking post. I defined a new role — the AI Marketing Technologist — and laid out the skills, the responsibilities, and the org-level integration this person would need. Someone who bridges marketing strategy and AI implementation. A catalyst. A translator between what the business needs and what the technology can do.
I still think the core insight was right. But eighteen months later, the framework is already too small.
Not because the role doesn’t matter. Because the thing I was trying to solve — “how do you connect marketing and AI?” — turned out to be the wrong question. The right question is bigger: what does a team even mean when AI can represent the specialized skills that teams were built around?
What Changed Isn’t the Technology. It’s the Unit.
There’s a conversation I keep having. A marketing leader with a team of nine wants to know how to make them feel like twenty-five. A PE firm building from scratch wants to know whether to hire a CMO or a SWAT team. A founder staring at a job description isn’t sure whether they need a person or a system.
They all sound like different problems. They’re the same problem.
Every one of them is designing around an assumption that hasn’t been true for about a year: that the basic unit of business capability is a team of specialists.
It used to be. You needed a content person and a paid media person and an analytics person and a project manager because those skills lived in separate human brains. The org chart was a map of where the knowledge lived. Marketing did marketing. Sales did sales. Ops connected them — badly, usually, but it was the best we had.
That structure existed to solve a distribution problem: specialized knowledge was scarce, lived in individuals, and needed to be organized into departments so it could be applied at scale.
Think about that for a second. The org chart was never a strategy. It was a workaround for the fact that expertise couldn’t be in two places at once. You couldn’t have your analytics person also writing content. You couldn’t have your content person also running paid media. So you hired specialists, grouped them by function, and built handoff processes to move work between them.
The entire departmental model — the one we treat as a natural law of business — was a solution to a distribution constraint.
That constraint is dissolving. Not completely. Not overnight. But fast enough that the org chart you’re designing today will look dated before the hire completes their onboarding.
The Zapier CEO Just Said It Out Loud
Wade Foster, the CEO of Zapier, put it plainly in a recent conversation: “Most organizations today are structured by function — Marketing, Sales, Engineering. These teams exist to provide specialized skills for projects, but LLMs increasingly represent those skills themselves.”
His conclusion: “The ideal team of the future isn’t 10 people with specialized skills. It’s one person with a team of agents.”
That’s not a prediction about some distant future. Zapier itself now runs more agents than employees, and they’re doing several hundred million in annual revenue with 800 people.
Sit with that for a second. The company that built the infrastructure for connecting business tools — the company that understands workflows better than almost anyone — is telling you that the fundamental unit of work is shifting from “team of specialists” to “domain expert plus agent team.”
This isn’t a vendor pitch. It’s a structural observation from someone who’s watching it happen inside his own company.
Why My 2024 Framework Was Too Small
When I defined the AI Marketing Technologist, I was solving for the gap between marketing strategy and AI execution. I said: you need a person who can sit between these two worlds and translate.
That framing assumed the org structure itself stays intact. Marketing stays marketing. Technology stays technology. You just add a bridging role to connect them.
What actually happened is more fundamental. The specialized skills that justified separate teams — content creation, data analysis, campaign execution, research, reporting — are increasingly available through AI. Not perfectly. But well enough that the question isn’t “who bridges marketing and AI?” It’s “when AI handles the functional execution, what’s left for the human?”
The answer: domain expertise. Judgment. Customer understanding. The ability to know which problem is worth solving and whether the output is any good.
In other words, the things that were always the most valuable — but used to be buried under the functional work required to act on them.
The Reason to Organize by Function Is Dissolving
Here’s what this means at the org level — not for individual roles, but for the structure itself.
When every person on your team can access specialist-level capabilities through AI, the reason to group people by specialty weakens. You don’t need a “content team” if one strategist with the right AI systems can produce, distribute, and measure content with more coherence than a five-person department that loses context at every handoff.
The value of each person shifts from what they can execute to what they understand. Domain expertise. Customer judgment. Knowing which problem is worth solving and whether the output actually solves it. Those skills don’t organize neatly into departments. They organize around problems — around customers, around products, around outcomes.
I wrote last week about how small businesses give away their structural advantage the moment they start hiring into traditional roles. This is the broader version of that argument: the departmental model isn’t just inefficient for small businesses. It’s becoming structurally obsolete for everyone.
The businesses pulling ahead aren’t the ones adding AI to their existing org charts. They’re the ones questioning why the chart looks like that in the first place.
What I’d Tell My 2024 Self
If I could go back to that September 2024 post, I wouldn’t delete it. The skills I identified — strategic marketing understanding, interpersonal leadership, technical comfort — are more relevant than ever. But I’d change the frame entirely.
Instead of: “You need to add this role to your team.”
I’d say: “You need to rethink what a team is.”
The AI Marketing Technologist was a bridging role for an org structure that assumed functional departments. The real shift is that the org structure itself is changing. Fewer people. More leverage. Domain experts paired with AI systems instead of specialists organized into departments.
That’s not a framework you implement. It’s a mental model you either adopt or get left behind by. And the businesses that adopt it — the ones who stop asking “what roles do we need?” and start asking “what capability do we need, and what’s the smallest, most connected unit that can deliver it?” — those are the ones that will feel like they have 25 people when they have nine.
If you’re staring at an org chart and wondering whether to fill a role or rethink the structure, that’s the conversation I’m having with every client right now. It’s different from the one I was having eighteen months ago — and it should be different for you too. Let’s talk about it.
Sources:
- Zapier, “Zapier’s Wade Foster on Humans Managing Agent Teams” (April 2026)
- Madrona, “Zapier’s AI Transformation Strategy: Code Red to More Agents Than People” (April 2026)
- Pallas Advisory, “The AI Marketing Technologist: Revolutionizing Marketing Organizational Structure” (September 2024)
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