Marketing (CMO, SVP) | All things AI | Sequoia Scout | Advisor
The traditional marketing team is DEAD. Welcome to the age of the generalist. The new marketing team will look very different. Most marketing orgs look like this: - Functional silos - Discipline-first roles (PMM, Demand Gen, Brand) - Built for how we ship things today This model is built for annual plans, quarterly reviews, and waterfall charts. AI will change this. It will: - Provide real-time insights on the biggest opportunities and problems to prioritize (based on internal/external data and custom training logic) - It allows teams to generate, test, and ship in a fraction of today's time. - It allows AI-enabled generalists to move incredibly quickly across various disciplines. Instead of "always-on" teams, we'll have 6/8 week 'mission pods': - Pods are cross-functional - Each pod will have a pointed outcome - Filled with AI-enabled generalists who can use AI to strategise, ship, learn, and iterate. When the mission ends, the pod dissolves. New signals = new missions = new pods. It's agile marketing, powered by AI, anchored on outcomes. And the best part? It removes all the current inefficiencies that come with today's orgs that slow us down from shipping. The AI era is for people who move fast and ship
Ina Toncheva
6mo
I agree with the vision, but I also see a challenge we don’t talk about enough. True generalists are rare and hard to train. AI won’t magically turn specialists into generalists - it’ll just reveal who already thinks that way. So we need to drive AI-adoption, but also build learning systems that help people think more like generalists.
Maz Jamasbi
6mo
I have a bit of a contrarian view. Although I agree with agile and cross-functionally capable marketing teams to break through the silos, I don't believe that having generalists collaborating with AI to uniquely strategize and iterate will lead to a differentiated and competitive offer. AI, at least in its current iteration, lacks imagining new business models simply because they haven't been trained on them. And without specialist to imagine, guide, test and iterate, every company will end up competing with similar strategies for the same share of the market.
Derek Greenhawk
6mo
I mean the marketing of today is a bit diluted from what is actually going on in most orgs, which is having strategic imperatives / OKRs that then interconnect teams together. Maybe the more consultancy driven organizations where that vertical specialization is necessary, but most in house marketing teams are already goal-oriented over specialization-oriented. Either way, siloed org structure of "today" wouldn't be solved by AI exclusively. It's more so around having the leadership / vision at the top to create necessary structures and match talent to SI/OKR and use AI to fill in the tactical execution gaps. At the end of the day, the talent needed to have goal-oriented marketing that can properly leverage AI while not racing-to-the-bottom, is a hot commodity that is not being actively cultivated in any organization. And no AI is training marketers to be naturally more horizontal in their skillsets.
Kerry Cunningham
5mo
Hm, everyone seems to love this. I think it's a recipe for stupid at scale. I'm not going to say it won't go this way. But I am saying that if it does, we are going to get mediocre crap at a scale we haven't known before. B2B marketing's biggest problem now and for the last 20 years has been that very few people really have expertise in any aspect of it. And the assumption has been that there's really not much to know. I've had the privilege to work with a lot of people who really were experts in their disciplines. And as I do my research and engage with marketers and the market, I find myself discovering time and again that much of what they were saying was right. And, tbh, a lot of it didn't seem so at the time, because I simply didn't know enough about their specific discipline to tell right from wrong -- or best from good, etc. If you offload expertise to AI - a world of people who thin-slice everything and rely on what GenAI says is right -- who is going to say, "yeah but..." when the machine gives bad advice, faulty 'expertise', etc? If what Keiran is suggesting comes to pass, it will be yet another stake in the heart of expertise. Interest here piqued by a video with Kathy Macchi.
This post caught my eye and sounds really catchy - but it over simplifies the reality of how Marketing works. I agree that everyone in Marketing needs to be AI-enabled and be agile enough to form squads to tackle specific goals/initiatives or shift priorities as the market changes. However, I don't agree that hiring nothing but AI-backed generalists will work for every company. For example, I could not do what my events marketer does to host incredible in-person events, which are key for our ICP, as a generalist using AI. I could not do what my multimedia producer does to capture real-world customer testimonial videos as a generalist using AI. Specialists are still needed, and specialists who use AI to do their work with more efficiency will replace those who don't.
Itamar H.
6mo
This is a really interesting view. I think the real change is going to come from Marketing’s shifting objective, as a direct result of how AI empowers the buyer, not the marketer. We have a whole new role, not just a set of net new, and upgraded capabilities.
Ayse Guvencer
6mo
I think AI era is demanding marketers understand cause and effect and time lag when it comes to GTM for B2B. which requires CasualAI. I agree with this framework but if you are operating with a flawed measurement framework of correlation, and simple ROI, you are in for a wild ride.
Change feelings, change minds, and change behavior.
6moTotally agree that AI will supercharge agile, outcome-driven pods—faster signals, faster shipping, faster learning. But here's the catch: speed alone isn’t a strategy. Yes, AI-enabled generalists can move across disciplines quickly, but they're still working within the limits of what they know and what the model knows. That’s where smart leaders stack the deck. Bringing in agency specialists—brand strategists, media pros, behavioral scientists, content experts—as needed into these pods is a force multiplier. You're injecting perspective, pattern recognition, and deep expertise that even the best generalist (or AI) can’t fake. It’s not about going back to silos—it’s about knowing when to bring in the sniper instead of handing the generalist another tool. The future isn't just fast. It’s fast and sharp. That’s how you win.