We are the last generation of marketing leaders managing human-only teams.

The role of the marketing leader has already started to change unrecognisably. Not in some future moment. It’s happening right now, in every room I’m in with senior marketing leaders. They use Custom GPTs daily. They’ve cracked prompting. They haven’t quite worked out what comes next and the public conversation is stuck somewhere between tool-of-the-week and job apocalypse. Neither is useful when you’re trying to figure out your operating model for the next 12 months.

In the near future, we’ll manage humans and agents, and our entire idea of team, resource and execution gets redrawn around that. It’s already happening for companies that are AI-native. All others will follow.

Marketing is evolving the way trading evolved

So when I think about the evolution of marketing, the analogy I keep coming back to is traders.

20 to 30 years ago, you had rooms of traders on Wall Street. Wolf of Wall Street style. Hand signals, wide spreads, margins distributed across hundreds of people.

That’s not the world today. Traders sit in an office. They’re heavily leveraged by two things.

• Infrastructure, the proprietary pipes that execute faster than any human could, plus proprietary data signals and software.

• Quant researchers, the maths PhDs building bespoke ML algorithms on top of trader expertise.

The trader’s judgement didn’t disappear. It got encoded, scaled and combined with a stack of technology no individual could ever build alone.

The role of the marketer is going to evolve exactly the way the role of the trader evolved. Same compression. Same upgrade in seniority. Even bigger per-person output multiplier.

The forward-looking marketing team is a small senior team, fully agentic, with embedded AI engineers and an agent library. 100× output per person.

That’s the chart. Now let me talk about who actually sits on it.

Role 1. The Agentic Marketing Strategist

This is the Agentic CMO 1.0. The most senior seat on the team. The work is strategic, not coding. It’s the person who orchestrates agents.

AI-native companies are already hiring very senior people specifically to do this. The more senior you are, the more you see the applications, the use cases, the system design.

The most important thing this role does is rethink workflows.

When you first work with AI, you tend to ask “how can I have a faster horse?” You’re not thinking “how can I build a car?”

The Agentic Marketing Strategist is the person who refuses “the faster horse” and redesigns how the work actually gets done.

The Agentic Marketing Strategist thinks about resources differently from a CMO today.

Today, when something lands on the marketing roadmap, you ask 3 questions.

1. Can my team do it.

2. Do I need a consultant.

3. Do I need an agency.

The Agentic Marketing Strategist asks a different 3.

1. Can an agent do it.

2. Do I need a human to support the agent.

3. Do I need a subject-matter expert to enhance the quality.

That’s the inversion. The agent becomes the main resource. Humans get added where judgement, brand or taste actually moves the work.

The whole question of “who do I hire for this” gets replaced by “what’s the combination of agents plus humans that gets this done at the standard I want.”

Once you see the question that way, you can’t un-see it. The org chart looks different. The budget looks different. The job spec looks different. And the seat at the top, the one designing it all, is the seat I think every CMO should be quietly designing for themselves.

Role 2. The Marketing / GTM Engineer

The marketer and the builder. Sits where the marketing function meets the agent infrastructure. Writes the agents the strategist designs. Connects the CMS, the ESP, the CRM and the analytics layer into something the agents can act on in production.

This is the role currently missing from almost every marketing org I walk into. Marketing has an ops lead. It doesn’t yet have an engineer. That changes in the next 18 months.

Role 3. The AI Engineer

The technical partner. Today’s technology lets us build simpler agents ourselves. For the more complex builds such as autonomous agents, multi-agent systems, anything production-grade, we still need AI engineers.

In the trader analogy, this is the quant.

The roles that will go

New roles will get created. Some roles will go.

The roles that get compressed are the execution and coordination layer. Campaign Managers. Content Managers with no writing skill. Project Managers. Performance Analyst who pulls reports. Anyone whose primary job is moving work between two people or two tools. If your week is mostly task management and rewriting briefs, the trader floor is coming for that seat.

The execution layer is being replaced.

It’s hard to read if you’re in one of those seats, and it’s hard to say if you’ve ever managed a team of them. You have time to redesign your career. Two to three years before most categories tip. Use it.

But pretending the compression isn’t happening doesn’t help anyone plan a career or design a team.

The roles that will stay

The roles that don’t go anywhere are the experts.

Brand Directors. Creative Strategists. Performance Marketers. Anyone whose job is judgement and taste.

Event Managers. Community Builders. Partnership Managers. Anyone whose job is relationships.

Agents can do every search but can’t tell you what good looks like. Every agent in the new stack sits downstream of human judgement, and the quality of the agent’s output is capped by the quality of the brief and the standards the expert holds it to.

Definition of done. Whenever you see slop, someone thought it was beautiful. Their definition of done was achieved. Experts hold a higher definition of done. Those skills get rarer and more expensive.

The expertise layer is being amplified.

The role of a marketing leader

And here’s the part I find genuinely exciting.

Strip the coordination layer out of the senior marketing role and what you’re left with looks a lot like what we did 20 years ago, before the dashboards and the campaign-coordinator-of-coordinators stack.

Human connection

We’ll talk to consumers again.

We’ll go to events to understand cultural trends.

We’ll organise communities.

We’ll do the things that require intuition and creativity.

AI can generate options from your input. But it’s your input. Where you get fresh input that’s different from your competitors is the new marketing job.

Tastemaker. Brand builder. Trendsetter.

In a much more human and community-focused way than today.

Today, brand can be three documents in a folder and we still call it a brand.

In the future, brand will be much more human, because AI will do the rest.

Agentic marketing system

You can’t just bolt a few agents onto your current setup. The aim is to build a team that runs an agentic marketing system on your behalf. A system of agents, humans and software that runs a smooth workflow.

The role of the marketer has already started changing unrecognisably. The question isn’t whether. It’s how fast you embrace the change.