“I replaced my entire marketing team with AI.”
“I replaced my entire marketing team with AI.”
Who else is tired of hearing this?
I just don’t buy it.
I keep seeing these types of posts:
“I don’t need marketers anymore.”
“My 12 agents run my entire marketing function now.”
Meanwhile, I’m over here simply trying to replace 89 spreadsheets and 47 repetitive tasks. 😂
If you’re measuring successful AI adoption by how many people you’ve replaced, I think you’ve missed the whole point of AI in marketing.
The goal of AI in marketing shouldn’t be to replace the marketer. It should be to automate everything that keeps the marketer from actually doing marketing.
Think about how much time field marketers spend on things like:
→ Cleaning registration lists
→ Matching attendees to accounts and reps
→ Researching target accounts before an event
→ Identifying high-value prospects on a registration list
→ Updating attendee and no-show statuses
→ Enriching contact data
→ Creating first drafts of sales follow-up
→ Pulling event performance data
→ Building post-event reports
→ Tracking down information Sales needs before an event
Most of that work still needs to happen.
Very little of it needs a field marketer manually doing it every single time.
That’s where I think AI gets really interesting.
If I perform the same process after every event, my first question now is: Can I build a system that does this for me?
I use AI every single day.
I automate as much of my work as I possibly can.
And the more I automate, the more convinced I am that you still need the marketer.
Someone still has to know what system to build.
A marketer has to define what a “high-value prospect” actually means.
A marketer has to decide which accounts matter, what Sales needs, and what happens when the AI gets something wrong.
And maybe most importantly, a marketer has to understand the business well enough to decide what should be automated in the first place.
The goal isn’t to figure out how much marketing AI can do without marketers.
I’m much more interested in figuring out how much marketing we can finally do when marketers stop spending their time on work a machine can handle.
So yes, I want AI doing more of my work.
A LOT more.
I just want it doing the work that gives me more time to be a better marketer.
And that’s how I’d measure successful AI adoption.
Now, will roles shift? Absolutely.
I wouldn’t be surprised if “Marketing AI Engineer” becomes a very real career path as marketers become responsible for building, orchestrating, and managing these systems.
But entire marketing teams being replaced by 12 AI agents?
I still don’t buy it.