Re-shaping marketing teams
Theory and CMO skills are one thing. Building the marketing team for the future is another matter. How do marketing leaders expect to make teams that are fit for purpose in the agentic era?
Re-shaping marketing teams
Theory and CMO skills are one thing. Building the marketing team for the future is another matter. How do marketing leaders expect to make teams that are fit for purpose in the agentic era?
expect to shift major agency and headcount budgets into AI infrastructure and licensing over the next two years
Marketing teams are heading for a structural reset. As agentic AI reshapes workflows, CMOs know incremental change won’t be enough: departments, budgets and ways of working will all need redesigning for a hybrid future of humans and AI agents.
Investment is already shifting away from traditional resource models and towards AI infrastructure, automation and orchestration.
“It’s exciting to consider how the marketing team will evolve in coming years. We have the opportunity to supercharge our efforts, by delivering higher quality work at a greater frequency – and serving customers and targets what they really want.
But that depends on identifying the right use cases for agentic AI in marketing, and then any training and refocusing needed for current roles.
It’s important to understand that human workforces will remain fundamental to the success of marketing teams – including in-house teams, agencies and partners. AI isn’t visionary, empathetic or even truly creative, so human insight remains critical.”
Future-fit teams
The focus is on building AI-ready organizations from the ground up. Marketing leaders are investing heavily in AI training, prompting skills and governance frameworks to ensure teams can manage AI outputs responsibly and effectively. At the same time, they’re strengthening data capabilities, rethinking team structures and rewriting job roles around AI competencies.
Execution-heavy tasks are increasingly being shifted toward AI systems, while human teams move into orchestration, oversight and strategic decision-making roles.
Some organisations are even creating entirely new functions dedicated to managing AI agents and automated workflows – signaling just how fundamentally marketing operations are beginning to change.
expect their marketing teams to have successfully implemented and be managing agentic AI workflows within the next 12 months
How CMOs are planning to prepare their teams
Providing training to improve the team's proficiency with AI tools and prompting - 50%
Establishing clear marketing and AI standards to audit and manage the team's AI-generated outputs - 48%
Hiring more data specialists to ensure our data infrastructure is AI-ready - 44%
Revisiting the divisional structure of the marketing team (e.g., in response to new ways of working as a result of AI) - 42%
Redefining job descriptions and performance plans to include AI-specific competencies - 35%
Transitioning existing staff from execution focused tasks to AI orchestration or oversight roles - 33%
Creating entirely new roles or departments dedicated to managing AI agents and automated workflows - 25%
Agentic benefits unlocked
Despite the disruption ahead, CMOs are overwhelmingly optimistic about what agentic AI could unlock for marketing teams. They’re not seeing AI agents as replacements for marketers, but as catalysts for higher-value work, automating repetitive execution so teams can focus on strategy, creativity and growth. From reporting and analytics to performance marketing and content production, CMOs expect agentic AI to reshape how work gets done across the board.
The opportunity is clear
Less time managing processes, more time driving innovation, commercial impact and competitive advantage.
agentic AI will enable my teams to shift focus from execution-heavy tasks to high-value strategic and creative work
excited that agentic AI will unlock greater value for the entire department
“We need to think about what tomorrow’s marketer looks like. Where do we have people doing their jobs, versus where do we get AI in place, as well as those hybrid teams? How do we start to train our team for the future organization that we're looking for?
We've still got the same people in place, but their job descriptions are changing slightly, and their skill sets are evolving. I think overall we're going to see a stronger blend of human and technology.”
