The New Marketing Function for Your Organization

Here's something I'm seeing more of out in the marketing world: marketing organizations investing heavily in AI tools across their teams — a content team using generative AI here, a media team automating there, an analytics group experimenting with agentic workflows — but with no clear accountability for the system of AI across marketing. How it all flows, aligns, best practices, standards, etc.

This all sounds...familiar.

We've been here before. A decade or two ago, marketing technology was proliferating across our organizations in exactly the same fragmented way. New tech was constantly being trialed, adopted (formally with IT or more often skunkworks-style), data siloes were accidentally created, platforms have deployed, and ROI quickly becoming questionable.

The response at the time was often a role that didn't previously exist: marketing operations. Someone who understood both the strategic intent of marketing and the technical infrastructure that powered it, a solid project manager, someone who could make the whole system work together.

I think we're at a similar inflection point with AI. Specifically, with the rise of agentic AI in marketing. And I believe the answer is a net-new function, Marketing AI Orchestration, and the logical anchor role within, the Marketing Orchestration Architect (or pick your favorite name).

Before we get into what this role is, let's be clear about what it isn't: it's not a way to offload AI expertise or accountability from marketing leaders or their teams. Just as hiring a head of marketing ops never removed the need for every marketer to understand their martech stack, or an analytics lead the responsibility for generalized data fluency, this role doesn't replace the responsibility of CMOs, directors, and individual marketers to be hands-on with AI agents and AI tools. It supplements the team with specialized expertise in agentic AI infrastructure and orchestration. It adds depth and accountability, not an excuse for distance.

The Gap Nobody Owns

BCG recently published research based on interviews with 60 CMOs and found that fewer than 30% were pursuing enterprise-wide AI initiatives; most were still stuck testing AI in isolated pockets. Their recommendation was to "invest in the connective tissue" — fund integration architectures and data flows so the CMO can orchestrate growth end-to-end. That's the right instinct, but it raises the question: who actually builds and manages that connective tissue day to day?

It's not your marketing ops lead, whose hands are full managing the existing martech stack and the constantly-shifting flows of customer data. It's not your data/analytics team, who may lack the marketing strategy context and regardless should be fully committed (if they exist at all, a luxury in many small/medium enterprise marketing shops). It's not IT, who don't understand brand governance or creative workflows, and for whom marketing is often viewed as a semi-rogue shop anyway. Each of these roles touches part of the problem, but none owns or even has full view into the whole system.

Meanwhile, the need to address this gap is accelerating. Gartner (their website was throwing fits when I posted this, so no link) predicts that 40% of enterprise applications will include integrated task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, a dramatic jump from less than 5% today. The wave is certainly building it seems.

What Does Marketing AI Orchestration Do?

The core mandate: design, deploy, govern, and continuously optimize the system of AI agents, human-AI workflows, and supporting infrastructure that powers the marketing organization.

In the Disruption-Fluent Marketing framework I've been developing, this role is essentially the enabling leadership function operationalized for AI. It creates the adaptive space where agentic AI can work alongside humans without either side breaking down. It bridges the structural need for governance and the creative need for experimentation.

In practice, this function owns several critical areas:

Agentic design: Mapping which marketing tasks are AI-led, human-led, or collaborative, and designing how handoffs work between them. This isn't just about deploying tools but designing the operating model for how all marketing assets (human and AI) and capabilities integrate across content, channels, analytics, and CRM/Automation. Implicit in this is “Agentic AI expertise”; this function needs to constantly be on the forefront of the rapidly changing set and capabilities of agentic technologies.

Governance: Establishing the guardrails, escalation paths, brand protocols, and quality standards that keep AI-augmented work aligned with brand and strategy. They need to be the enforcers of critical "human-in-the-loop" policies, to avoid the very real temptation to simply turn on the AI slop engine to create the appearance of productivity. Think of it as Minimum Viable Bureaucracy applied directly to AI infrastructure: just enough structure to enable, but not enough to constrain creativity and innovation.

Cross-functional integration. Ensuring AI workflows connect across the marketing organization, and even across agentic AI deployments counterpart orgs such as Sales, Custoemr Success, and Product, rather than remaining siloed within individual teams. This is the person who sees how the content team's AI agents relate to the paid media team's automation and the analytics team's attribution, and designs the connections and flows that get them all moving together.

Measurement and optimization. Defining new KPIs for AI-intentional marketing. things like human-to-agent handoffs, agent quality tracking, and the balance between speed and output and quality and authenticity. Traditional marketing metrics simply don't capture this, at least in their current iteration.

Change management. Helping teams adopt and trust AI workflows, overcoming the inevitable (and reasonable) "I don't trust the robot" cognitive gap. This ties directly to cultural readiness, the foundational dimension of any disruption-fluent organization.

What This Function - and Talent - Looks Like

This is a hybrid skill profile. Not a pure technologist, not a pure marketer. Someone who understands marketing strategy well enough to know what matters, technical infrastructure well enough to know what's possible, and organizational dynamics well enough to know what will actually get adopted.

Think back to how the best marketing ops leaders emerged a decade+ ago, as a hybrid that nobody had a job description for, combining technical and data fluency, strategic marketing understanding, project management skills and operational instincts. This function follows the same pattern, one step further into the AI era in effect. MOPS is the logical place to find these people today, but again, this isn’t just a “MOPS-meets-AI” role; it requires a broad and highly flexible, creative skill- and mindset to succeed. Digital marketers, agency-side strategists, and others with the drive and curiosity might be the best initial candidates.

In terms of organizational placement, this likely reports to the CMO or VP/Head of Marketing Operations. Why? It can't be buried in IT, delegated to an agency, or sit within most established marketing channel or functional teams (Brand, Growth, Product, etc.) otherwise it risks being siloed. It needs to sit close enough to marketing (and organizational) strategy to maintain coherence and close enough to marketing execution to stay practical. It also needs close proximity to an executive champion and coach, both to help ensure internal traction and connect it with peer roles in other functions across the organization.

Everyone Becomes an "Agent Boss"

Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index introduced a concept they call the "agent boss": someone who builds, delegates to, and manages AI agents to amplify their impact. Their data showed that 82% of leaders expect to use digital labor to expand their workforce capacity in the next 12–18 months, yet only 23% feel confident about effective integration. That confidence gap is the blaring red siren for agentic AI adoption and traction, and where this new function naturally sits.

But here's the critical point: the agent boss concept applies to everyone in marketing, not just the orchestration team. The marketing organization of the future will involve marketers and marketing leaders at every level managing hybrid workforces of humans and AI agents. In many ways, this is a natural evolution of the flexible workforce model many of us already use, where a dedicated FTE team is supplemented and extended with agencies, contractors, and freelancers for task-specific work or unique expertise (“an FTE and a cloud of freelancers” is a term I love). AI agents become another layer of that extended team, sometimes handling routine execution, sometimes augmenting human capabilities on complex work.

The Marketing AI Orchestration function or architect doesn't manage all those agents centrally. Instead, they design and maintain the system within which every marketer on the team can effectively manage their own human-AI workflows. They're building the infrastructure and governance that makes everyone else's agent management more effective, just as marketing ops builds the data and technical infrastructure that makes every marketer's use of martech more effective.

So, So Many AI Tools

The marketing organizations that win in the next few years won't be the ones with the most AI tools. They'll be the ones who architect how those tools work together, with their teams, in service of the marketing and organizational strategy. This requires both generalized curiosity and AI-fluency across the marketing team, inclulding and (arguably) especially at the CMO level, but also an organization that recognizes and adapts to a complicated and highly disruptive new set of technologies and invests the time, focus, and resources into adopting them properly, with focus and discipline.