---
title: The Great Marketing Delusion
slug: books/agentic-gtm-engineering/the-great-marketing-delusion
docTags: 
createdAt: 2024-12-19T12:17:54.924Z
---

:::hint{type="warning"}
As I am wrapping up the final edits to this book, OpenAI has made a new announcement: their first AI agent is Operator.

This is not new technology, but it should be more widely distributed than Claude's Computer use or the open-source alternatives.

More people will prompt chatGPT to do tasks for them, potentially waiting hours instead of minutes to finish them 😅
:::

Six years ago, I sat in an IBM marketing squad. We needed six specialists to send a single email campaign:

- A **product marketer** for messaging
- A **copywriter** for the words
- A **designer** for the look
- A **data analyst** for segmentation
- A **marketing automation expert** for the tech
- A **campaign manage**r to orchestrate it all

It used to take six people a few weeks just to send an email.

Today, I can set up an **AI agent** that does all of that in under a day. But that's not even the interesting part.

*This isn’t just about doing the same thing faster - it’s about rethinking the entire system. *

***

## The End of Specialists

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Back in 2021, Sam Altman made the prediction that knowledge work will be most impacted by AI.

We've been telling ourselves a story about marketing. A story about specialists and expertise and years of experience.

But what if that story was wrong?

What if specialization was just a way to hide from the truth? The truth is that most marketing work isn't about expertise – it's about execution.

Here's what the tech leaders are saying:

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**Marc Benioff **(Salesforce) thinks developers will be replaced.
:::

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**Sundar Pichai** (Google) believes AI is more profound than electricity.
:::

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**Jeff Bezos **says that AI is impacting every industry horizontally.
:::
::::

Here's my take:

**In five years, nobody will hire marketers anymore. At least not specialists.**

Let's board the AI hype train.

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