Human+AI
Designing the marketing org your competitors are already building.
Open warm, slow. "I'm not here to tell you AI is coming. You already use it. I'm here about the thing almost no one has done. Redesigning the organisation around it. Whoever does it first in your category doesn't get 10% better. They get a different kind of company." Land the title. This is about org design, not tools.
Springboard. Tell a short, concrete story. Use a real one if you have it, a small team you've seen out-ship a big one. The advantage wasn't budget or headcount. It was the shape of the team. Pause before clicking on.
★ HANDS-UP BEAT (do this before the numbers land). "Quick show of hands. Who's used AI in their marketing in the last month?" (most hands rise) "Keep them up. Now keep your hand up only if you've actually redesigned a workflow around it. Changed how the team works, not just added a tool." (most hands drop) "Look around. That's the eighty-seven and the eight, in this room." Then reveal the numbers. It makes the stat personal and gives the room a shared moment.
The spine of the talk. Everyone here is in the 87%. Almost no one is in the 8%. The 87% bought tools. The 8% changed the org. The rest of the talk is how you cross that gap, and why you have less time than you think. APAC adoption sits near 84%, so this room isn't behind on tools. It's on the start line for design.
The spine of the talk. Everyone here is in the 87%. Almost no one is in the 8%. The 87% bought tools. The 8% changed the org. The rest of the talk is how you cross that gap, and why you have less time than you think. APAC adoption sits near 84%, so this room isn't behind on tools. It's on the start line for design.
Set the baseline everyone recognises. More reach meant more people, more agencies, more specialist layers. Capability was a function of headcount. Every org chart in this room is a monument to that equation. This is the assumption you are about to break.
The hinge of the talk. Say it slowly, let it sit. For the first time, a team can add capability without adding people. That single sentence breaks the operating logic underneath every marketing org chart ever drawn. Everything after this is consequences.
Concrete proof, brand names. This isn't a startup curiosity. It's Amazon, the company that invented the two-pizza team, now rebuilding it around agents. For marketing, the smallest unit that can carry an idea all the way to market is collapsing toward one capable human running a system. Don't celebrate or fear it. Just notice the floor is moving.
Name the mistake so the room sees itself. Most "AI transformation" is a faster horse, AI laid on top of a structure designed for humans only. You get slightly quicker execution and call it change. Real advantage comes from redesigning the operating system, not speeding up the old one. Regional proof they can't wave off as a US story is Grab. Anthony Tan is rebuilding the super-app as a "cyborganisation", putting AI agents straight into the hands of every merchant and driver while most companies are still piloting internally. Redesign, not bolt-on, happening in their own backyard.
The regional anchor. Say it with weight. This is the proof that redesign isn't a Silicon Valley story. Grab, the super-app this room uses every day, is rebuilding the whole company around AI. Anthony Tan calls it a cyborganisation. An agent for every driver and every merchant, in their hands, not in a pilot. Hold on the word and let them photograph it. Then make the scale point. A super-app does this with thousands of people. Keep that in mind, because later you show the same move done by one person, yours.
The reframe. Co-intelligence. "AI for the team" keeps it a tool you point at work. The leaders pulling ahead treat it as a new kind of teammate and redraw the team itself. Mimi opened this morning on what only humans can do, empathy and listening. My structural question. How do you build an organisation that puts that human genius exactly where it counts and lets the machines carry everything else?
Make it tangible. Talk briefly about co-intelligent teams you've actually built, your own work. The CMO's job stops being a hiring plan and becomes a composition plan. What mix of humans and agents, pointed at what, with which human holding judgement. Keep it human. The people you already have matter more, not less, because they get to do the part only people can.
This is your blue-ocean idea. Nobody else on this agenda has it, so spend time here. The same capability that ships a campaign can stand up a whole brand. The most ambitious CMOs will stop counting campaigns and begin counting ventures launched. Marketing becomes the company's growth studio. This is the line that should get quoted back to you in the hallway.
Proof, not theory
My own brands are
powered by agents.
Crayon Dreaming
Generate a colouring page from any child's idea.
Snaffld
Automated inventory sourcing for collectibles.
Grab does this with thousands of people. Same move, minus the headcount.
The credibility move. You stop being a pundit and become a practitioner. Grab does it at super-app scale. You do it solo, across your own brands, where the marketing and growth are run by agents. Stay humble and concrete. The point isn't the size of these products. It's that the model already works at a scale of one. If anyone asks, say plainly what the agents handle day to day. Then turn to the hard question. Who holds the wheel.
Case study
A $200k marketing team,
run for $300 a month.
An Australian brokerage. The founder was about to hire a Head of Marketing and fund agencies. Now Emu Money uses a department of AI agents instead.
Emu Money, reported results over three months, 2026 · emumoney.com.au
The proof that lands hardest. Slow right down. Emu Money is a real Australian brokerage, 27 brokers. In March the plan was ordinary. Hire a Head of Marketing, hand them a big budget for SEO, paid and social agencies. Then the founder wrecked his knee, had surgery, and spent a few weeks with his leg up. In that window he built an LLM-agnostic team of agents and launched it as his new CMO. Three weeks of build. The human detail is optional, but rooms remember it. Then hit the contrast. A two hundred thousand dollar plan, running for about three hundred dollars a month. Let the number sit before you show what it produced.
The receipts. Read them plainly and let the numbers work. Organic visitors were 80 a day. Now close to twelve thousand. Qualified leads were one or two a day. Now more than thirty, about nine hundred a month, worth roughly a hundred and seventy thousand a month at their old cost per lead. And the fear sitting in this room, being invisible to AI. Emu had zero LLM citations. Now hundreds a week across every major model. It also publishes five to seven SEO articles a day and runs its own paid and social, all agent-run, with the founder approving. This one company is the whole talk.
The how, for the sceptics. Keep it concrete. This is a real operating structure, not a black box. Claudia is the orchestrator, the head of marketing. Under her sit five specialist agents. SEO, content, paid media, a front-end developer for landing pages, and a reporting analyst. The whole thing runs from a shared Google Drive as plain files. Every draft and every decision is a readable file a human can open. The founder approves everything, and by the time it reaches him it has already passed the quality gate. It even learns, feedback shapes how the agents behave next time. The point for this room. This is designable. You can draw this org on a whiteboard. That is the job now.
Deliberate gear change into the serious part. Everything so far is upside. Now the catch. Autonomy without design is chaos. Thin out the managers, hand work to agents and high-agency people, and the old control system disappears, the one where managers translated strategy down the line. So what coordinates the work now? Let it hang for a beat.
Make the analogy explicit, then land it fast. Point at the flock and say. "Watch a murmuration. Thousands of birds, no leader, no meetings, and they still turn as one. How? Every bird runs the same three simple rules, in real time." Then the bridge. "An AI-powered team works the same way. You can't put a manager over every person and every agent. So the coordination has to come from the strategy itself, simple enough that every human and every agent can act on it without asking." That is the setup for the next three slides. If the metaphor ever feels shaky, drop it and say the plain version out loud. When the team runs itself, the strategy is the manager. (Framing owed to Matt Ström-Awn.)
Reframe a cliché the room already believes. Culture usually wins because strategy is written to be filed, not used. But a strategy can be engineered to spread and to drive decisions on its own, and then it sets the culture. Two properties make that happen. Next slide.
The intellectual centrepiece, the framework you give the room to take home. Salience means the strategy guides a real decision today (clear and usable). Memeticity means it survives being passed around (frequent and accurate). High/high is the only quadrant that runs a high-agency, AI-enabled team, because there are no managers to translate or enforce. The other three all need management to work. Amazon's "two-pizza team" lives top-right. Most corporate strategy dies bottom-left. Your AI org needs top-right or it won't coordinate.
Make it practical. These are the levers a CMO now pulls. The new craft is writing rules a human-and-machine team can run without you in the room. Small, so it fits in working memory. Reasoned, so it self-corrects when reality drifts. Testable, the way Southwest asks "does this make us THE low-fare airline?", a checksum anyone or any agent can apply. Repeated, so it's the default answer when no one knows what to do. This is governance for autonomy, and it's now core CMO work.
Bring it back to them personally. The biggest lever a marketing leader now pulls is not a campaign. It's the operating system the campaigns run on, the rules, the guardrails, the measurement, who holds judgement. Execution is more and more the machine's job. Design is more and more yours. The CMOs who get this stop being the bottleneck and become the multiplier.
Create urgency without hype. This isn't "AI is the future". A redesigned org compounds. It learns and improves on a faster clock, so a lead taken now is hard to close later. The window to be early is roughly the next two years. After that you're not gaining advantage, you're paying off debt. The cost of waiting isn't standing still. It's falling behind a curve that's bending up.
Close on the agenda's own question, answered. The room came in asking "CMOs vs AI-driven decision systems", as if it's a fight. It isn't. The winner is the leader who designs the system the decisions run inside. Build the org your competitors are still only talking about. Then open the Q&A, and if it's useful, "come find me, this is exactly the work we do at Skella & Co." Thank them warmly.