By Bronwyn Heys

There’s a quiet revolution happening in marketing departments—and if you’re not hearing it, you’re not listening hard enough. AI isn’t just transforming how we work. It’s reshaping who works, why we hire, and what makes a high-performing marketing team.

We are entering the era of the AI-first marketing team—teams built with artificial intelligence embedded into their strategy, workflows and culture from the start. No more waiting on use cases or pilots. It’s happening now, and it’s happening fast.

The Future Team Is Already Forming

Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index shows that:

– 47% of global leaders say AI upskilling is their top workforce strategy
– 45% plan to use AI as digital labour while maintaining headcount
– A third of companies are actively planning to reduce roles as AI tools take over repeatable tasks

At the same time, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs 2025 report, AI and big data are the fastest-growing global skills, and 59 out of 100 workers will need reskilling by 2030. These are significant hard numbers.

The future of marketing isn’t about adding AI tools to existing roles. It’s about building roles around AI’s capabilities and that’s a fundamental shift in talent, structure and leadership. That means that we will need to start from scratch and build a new AI powered marketing team with a new org structure.

What Is an AI-First Marketing Team?

It’s not just a team that uses AI. It’s a team rearchitected around it.

AI-first marketing teams:
– Are designed with AI at the centre of every workflow, not tacked on later
– Hire for AI fluency, not just years of industry experience ( though in my belief both will complement)
– Measure performance by how well humans and machines collaborate
– Spend less time executing and more time experimenting, prompting, analysing and training systems

They don’t fear AI replacing work, they actively design it to unlock better work.

The Shift from Digital-First to AI-First

Let’s be honest: most of us remember when “digital-first” felt radical. Now, it’s everyday.

The AI shift is happening faster. Companies are being built AI-first from day one, skipping layers of traditional roles and processes entirely. In these teams, there is no “marketing ops” role because the ops are automated. There is no junior insights analyst there’s an AI model trained to surface patterns, while the human focuses on interpreting and applying the data to growth strategy.

This isn’t tomorrow’s org chart. It’s already emerging.

The Real Challenge: Not Tech, But Change

The big blocker isn’t technology. It’s change.

Many marketing leaders are still hesitant waiting for the perfect roadmap, fearing job losses, unsure how to reskill legacy teams. But the truth is: AI won’t take your job. A marketer who uses AI will.

The leaders who embrace that now who redesign roles, reskill talent, and rethink what marketing is—will be the ones who set the standard for the next decade.

Final Thought: Think AI First

I say this to every CEO and CMO I work with: Don’t ask how AI can fit into your current team. Ask what your team would look like if you built it AI-first from the start.

That’s the conversation we need to be having now. Because marketing isn’t just evolving. It’s being re-coded, and redesigned to look completely different and will see a return to Marketers being strategist and growth enablers.

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#ThinkAIFirst