Beyond The AI Hype - How Smart Marketers Are Leveraging & Where Marketing & Growth Departments Are Going To Be Reshaped

25 Oct

Written By Danny Denhard

Here I am presenting at the recent MLF conference, where I took Marketers & Business leaders through AI and my predictions for the future of AI & where Marketing Org Design will be fundamentally reshaped

This is TLDR of my latest conference talk - Beyond The AI Hype (read the full break down with Q&A here).

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AI Is Powerful But… AI is early but useful; focus on trust, improving productivity at the individual and team level, cross-functional workflows, and create ways to measure AI ROI by 2026.
AI At Crawl Phase: I still believe AI is as the early-stage, powerful yet imperfect and nowhere near where it could be.
- The core is the 3Ts: Time, Trust, Truth. You still have to validate and verify outputs, not just ship faster and more. Quality is and always will be paramount!
Shifting Landscape: Marketers should prepare for “answer & creation engines,” not just search engines, be prepared to build out agentic workflows, and understand that social feeds will be dominated by unconnected (not from friends, family, colleagues and the brands they choose to follow) content.
- Treat your website as the creative home and hub (offer games, reward programs etc) while optimising for LLM and agent visibility.
Internal Use Cases No One Is Talking About: Practical wins include:
- Internal workflows,
- Large analysis pieces without waiting for Data/BI, Product Teams and numerous meetings,
- QBRs - localised to the teams in each country and potentially translated into local languages
- Daily stand-ups and sit-downs
External Use Cases:
- Improve external semi automations around content 1 → 6 content - taking content repurposing to the next level - podcasts to blog posts, blog posts to audio messages
- Scheduling the right content at the right time to the right cohort
- Human+AI remains key: have guidelines, templates, frameworks, outlines, editorial checks, and taste.
Slop Risk: Brand risk is rising with “AI slop.” Use quality guidelines, an AI manifesto, and audience tests to protect trust.
Marketing Org Design Reshaped: Roles and teams will reshape toward full-funnel, cross-functional collaboration. New categories should emerge under Brand, Performance, Amplification, and Distribution.
- Be mindful that agentic will reshape how teams are built, collaborate and often deliver tasks with and for the agent.
AI ROI: By Q2 2026, shift from productivity to true ROI: conversions and revenue, not tool spend. Expect agentic support across user journeys and fully integrated into Growth & Marketing ops.
My Recent Case Study: From my Marketing in 2030 CMO report: AI will automate tactical work, speed creative production, and prioritise efficiency. Channels likely up: GEO, Events, Partnerships, Social, OOH. Likely down: SEO, TV, PPC, Email, Print.
Key takeaways: Build for durable trust and outcomes, with less hype and better quality. This enables you to ensure that your team members are accustomed to speaking to the technical audience, the Product audience, and the general public. Ultimately, understand that ROI in AI will require a more measurable impact.