Into 2026 - how marketing teams and individual marketers are evolving, thanks to AI

We know that AI is driving change in marketing. It’s incorporated in content development, campaign building, and more. But it’s also changing the structure of marketing teams, individual marketers' skill sets, and marketing technology itself. According to Amanda Cole, CMO at Bloomreach, her marketing team was previously organized by function (e.g., product design, content), but is now organized by objectives (e.g., grow in retail or grow in strategic verticals). There are still functional teams, but they focus on strategic objectives. By focusing on strategic objectives, teams can go further down the funnel across every area of the business, she says. 

It’s not only how teams are aligned structurally that is changing; it’s also the makeup of those teams. AI teammates are becoming key members of marketing teams, performing tasks independently of humans. Cole notes that an AI teammate may still need more guidance at certain points, but they can do a lot on their own. She also said that they have not reduced team size by adding agents.

One example she provides for AI teammates was the content development process. Content teams can leverage AI to move further along in the creative process more quickly. They can create content to a certain point, and others (humans or other agents) can use that content to create additional types of content.

This focus on strategic objectives and the use of AI teammates has enabled Cole’s marketing organizations to pursue more objectives:

So we do have an agent-human org, and we have not reduced our team size. What we've actually been able to do is sign up for more objectives. So instead of two, we have four. And instead of working with just our new logo growth, we're also working on customer and partner growth, and we're also able to sign up for a higher pipeline target. So those are some examples of how we've changed thinking about marketing and our team.

Meera Murthy, GM & VP of Product at Bloomreach, is hearing the same thing from Bloomreach customers. They aren’t reducing marketing team size, but they are raising targets. It’s the skill sets and what marketers spend their time on that are changing:

Previously, they may have spent more time managing a vendor solution, but because of AI agents and technology like our Affinity solution, which is an autonomous marketing solution, what it unlocks is customers not having to write HTML code or write copy, and instead use an agent for copy or an agent for building a full journey and journey orchestration. Those are things that allow the marketer to focus on more of the business. So, like that Sideshow example, Dennis is excited about doing five more things than he would have done, five more lifecycle marketing campaigns than he would have done when he had to think about the end-to-end process, the data, to building to testing everything. All that gets significantly reduced in terms of time commitment and efficiency

Bloomreach has also added an AI GTM (Go-to-market) team that builds and owns the brain of the organization. The brain is trained on Bloomreach data, including products, customers, tone of voice, call data, win/loss reasons, competitors, contract language, etc. There are layers of agents around the brain that specialize in different roles. Everyone involved in GTM uses this brain.

The rise of the AI-empowered full-stack marketer

As marketing teams evolve, so will marketers themselves. We may not see the end of role-specific titles this year, but we will see more marketers build skills across marketing roles.

It’s called the full-stack marketer, and it’s not necessarily a new title. Marketers in smaller companies often perform multiple roles, including strategy for email, content, brand, and social media, as well as execution. But in larger companies, these jobs are typically performed by different people and managed by different marketing teams.

Siddhesh Joglekar, CEO at SkillTyro, described this role in a LinkedIn article:

A full-stack marketer is essentially a marketing Swiss Army knife. They have “a diverse skill set spanning the entire marketing spectrum, from strategy to execution across various channels”. Think of someone who can brainstorm a campaign strategy in the morning, tweak SEO and analytics at lunch, design social posts in the afternoon, and launch a paid ad campaign by evening. According to a recent Semrush report, full-stack marketers blend “agility, tech-savviness and strategic insight,” with enough depth in each area to integrate many channels into one coherent strategy. This broad competence and adaptability – moving from high-level strategy to hands-on execution – is what sets them apart.

Full-stack marketers lean heavily on AI, building AI teammates, custom GPTs, apps, and more to support strategy, program, and content design and execution. Using AI doesn’t mean they don’t have to understand all parts of their work; they do. They have to train the AI to understand the business and how they want the AI to support them with their work.

Joglekar’s article discusses the skills a full-stack marketer brings, but one stood out to me: managing marketing technology.

Shrinking the martech stack

Speaking with martech vendors, it’s clear that we are starting to see more marketing platforms increase capabilities to the point where one platform will provide most of the technology required (with some key partnerships).

Cole says that, from a product perspective, Bloomreach is betting that channel consolidation will be fast-tracked and that, even without AI, CMOs don’t want to use multiple apps. Historically, it may have been difficult to bring all these capabilities together under a single platform because the workflows are very different. But as channel strategy evolves into a more omni-channel model and AI takes on more of the work, a single platform again becomes possible. she argues:

Go back to your foundational data and information. Who is managing and controlling that information? And then the partners in the ecosystems that you're working with. Are they thinking about what this new digital future looks like? Be less worried about the channel strategy, the paid media, the events, the website. You still have to do that, yes, but that's not going to help you transform your organization.

Instead of focusing on individual channels, marketing becomes more outcome-based. Achieving an outcome may depend on one channel or many, and you won’t know that upfront:

The systems will become dependent on the outcome that you want to drive, because you have to add a layer of training for agents to actually take an action that's beyond just understanding and regurgitating information. You have to train an agent on why they're doing something and what to do in order to achieve an outcome. And that's why systems will become more outcome-based.

The shift from channels to outcomes could reduce the number of technologies in the martech stack. Today, organizations have a wide range of software in their stacks. But if marketing teams look for tech providers that can handle multiple tasks with a single tool with AI support, they have a smaller stack to manage. It also means the full-stack marketer and their AI teams have a single tool to work with, which can drive efficiencies and shorten time-to-market for marketing work.

My take

2026 will be an interesting year for marketing. The pressure to adopt AI for the right use cases has never been greater. But what the right things are is changing almost daily. Marketing teams need to rethink how they work, and marketers need to expand their skill sets and leverage AI to remain relevant and grow their opportunities. Mistakes will be made, but we’ll also start to see some really innovative marketing from those open to the possibilities.