Your marketing org chart looks the same as it did in 2019. That's your problem.

Marketing director at the top. Coordinators handling execution. Specialists for SEO, paid ads, social media. Maybe a content person. Everyone has a neat little box with clear responsibilities. It looks organized. It looks professional. It's completely obsolete.

AI just eliminated most of those roles. Not theoretically. Actually. Marketing departments are restructuring right now, terminating people, and discovering they don't know what their team should look like anymore.

Welcome to the liminal state. The old structure is gone. The new one isn't fully formed. And marketing leaders are making decisions with incomplete information about what roles even matter anymore.

The Roles That Used to Be Clean Cut

Remember when building a marketing team was straightforward?

You hired a marketing coordinator to handle the tactical execution. Email campaigns. Social media posting. Event logistics. Content scheduling. All the day-to-day work that needed doing but didn't require strategic thinking.

Then you brought on specialists. Digital marketing specialist for your website and analytics. SEO person or vendor for organic search. Paid ads specialist for your campaigns. Maybe a content writer if you were serious about inbound.

Above them, a marketing director to set strategy and manage the team. Clean hierarchy. Clear reporting lines. Everyone knew their job.

This structure worked because marketing was execution-heavy. You needed bodies to do the work. Running campaigns meant manual effort. Creating content meant writing every word yourself. Managing social media meant logging in and posting. Everything took time and hands.

AI changed the fundamental equation. When 80% of execution work can be automated, most of those roles become redundant.

What AI Actually Eliminates

Start with coordination work. Marketing coordinators exist to organize, schedule, and execute repetitive tasks.

Email campaign setup. Social media scheduling. Project management updates. Task assignments. Meeting coordination. Report generation. All of it can be automated with properly configured AI agents.

Not theoretically. Right now. AI agents integrated with project management tools, calendars, and email systems handle this work faster and more consistently than humans. They don't forget. They don't get overwhelmed. They follow rules perfectly every time.

The coordinator role doesn't disappear entirely. But it shrinks dramatically. One junior person handling what used to require three or four. And their job description changes—they become the human backstop for AI systems, not the primary executor.

Content creation is next. Marketing specialists who primarily create content—blog posts, social copy, email sequences—are competing with AI that produces first drafts in minutes.

The value shifts from creation to curation and quality assurance. If AI generates ten blog posts in an hour, you need someone who can evaluate whether they're good enough, align with brand voice, and serve strategic goals. That's editorial judgment, not writing skill.

Most organizations don't need three content creators anymore. They need one editor with strong strategic instincts who can work with AI at scale.

Project management becomes fully automated. Task assignment. Status updates. Deadline reminders. Progress tracking. Dependency management. All rule-based work that AI handles natively.

The project manager role either disappears or evolves into something else entirely. If you keep someone in that position, they're doing strategic resource allocation, not updating spreadsheets.

The Flat Structure That Replaces Hierarchy

The new marketing org chart has two layers. Strategic executives at the top. Junior support at the bottom. Nothing in between.

This sounds radical until you think through what work actually remains for humans.

Strategic work requires judgment AI doesn't have. Which markets to target. Which messages to test. How to position against competitors. What to do when a campaign fails. These decisions need human experience and intuition.

Execution work that requires human presence. Attending events. Building relationships. Closing deals. Having conversations that build trust. These interactions need humans in the room or on the call.

Everything else—the coordination, the content creation, the project management, the reporting—gets automated or eliminated.

What you end up with is a small team of highly capable strategists working alongside AI systems. No middle management. No coordinators managing workflows AI handles. No specialists doing execution work that's now automated.

Real structures emerging right now: Three human strategists plus six AI agents replacing ten-person marketing departments. Two senior people plus coordinator-level support plus complete automation of execution work.

The people who remain are expensive. Six-figure salaries minimum. Not because titles inflated. Because the work requires senior-level strategic thinking that junior people can't deliver.

You can't afford to pay someone $150,000 to schedule social media posts. But you can afford to pay them that much to build community, win business, and make strategic decisions that impact revenue.

The One Exception: The Gopher Role

Every flattened marketing organization needs one junior person. Not for sentiment. For practical reasons.

Someone needs to register for conferences. Order swag. Build event booths. Coordinate schedules. Handle the tactical logistics that don't require strategic thinking but do require human attention.

AI can't physically show up to events. It can't make judgment calls on booth layout. It can't build relationships with vendors or handle last-minute changes on the ground.

The gopher role also serves as your talent pipeline. You need a way to develop junior people into senior strategists over time. If everyone on your team is already at the executive level, you have no internal development path.

Bring someone in at coordinator level. Give them the tactical work. Let them observe strategy development. Train them on AI systems. Teach them the business. In three to five years, they might grow into strategic roles.

This is the only junior position that justifies its existence in AI-powered marketing departments. Everything else either needs senior-level strategic capability or gets automated.

Why Everyone Else Makes Six Figures

When AI handles execution, human salary requirements change dramatically.

You're not paying for hours worked. You're paying for strategic judgment and business impact. The person who can build a complete go-to-market strategy, deploy it with AI systems, and iterate based on performance is worth multiple mediocre executors.

The market is starting to reflect this. Marketing strategists who actually understand AI implementation command $150,000 to $250,000. Not because companies have extra budget. Because one person with these skills replaces three traditional marketers.

If someone on your team can't operate at this level, they probably shouldn't be on your team. That sounds harsh. It's just math.

You can't justify paying someone $75,000 to do work that AI does for the cost of a software subscription. You can justify paying someone $175,000 to orchestrate AI systems that produce what used to require a team of five.

The salary floor rises because the skill floor rises. Everyone remaining needs to be capable of strategic work, AI system management, and business development. Those capabilities don't come cheap.

The Liminal State Problem

Here's what makes this transition brutal: We're between paradigms.

The old structure is clearly broken. AI eliminates too many traditional roles to keep org charts the same. But the new structure isn't fully defined yet. We don't have established job descriptions. We don't have standard skill requirements. We don't have benchmarks for performance.

Marketing leaders are making restructuring decisions without complete information. Who do you keep? Who do you cut? What roles do you hire for? What do you outsource?

The honest answer is that most people don't know yet. The capabilities required are still emerging. The tools are still being built. The workflows are still being optimized.

What's clear is that doing nothing—keeping traditional structures intact—guarantees falling behind. Competitors who flatten their organizations and deploy AI get more done faster with fewer people.

The window for making this transition is narrow. Maybe two years before the market standard shifts and late adopters can't compete on talent or efficiency.

What Gets Outsourced vs What Stays Internal

The new question isn't what to hire for. It's what to build internally versus what to outsource.

Certain capabilities are nearly impossible to hire for right now. AI-powered content systems. Agentic workflow automation. Strategic AI implementation. These skills have only existed for a few years. No one learned them in college. Most employers haven't trained for them.

Outsourcing to agencies or consultants who specialize in AI-powered marketing makes more sense than trying to hire internally for skills you can't evaluate.

What stays internal: Brand knowledge. Industry relationships. Business context. The deep understanding of your company, your customers, and your market that no external partner can replicate.

What gets outsourced: Execution systems. AI agent development. Content production at scale. SEO strategy. Technical implementation. Anything that benefits from specialized expertise and doesn't require daily immersion in your business.

The fractional model becomes standard. A few internal strategists who own brand and business development. Agency partners who handle AI-powered execution. Contractors for specialized projects.

Traditional fully-staffed internal marketing departments become the exception, not the rule. Too expensive. Too hard to hire for. Too slow to adapt as tools evolve.

The Brutal Assessment Question

If you're looking at your current team trying to figure out who stays, there's one question that matters.

Can they win business?

Not "are they good at their job" by 2019 standards. Not "do they work hard" or "are they team players." Can they directly contribute to revenue by building relationships, creating demand, or closing deals?

If the answer is no, and they can't move into strategic work fast enough, they're probably not going to make it in the flat organization.

AI does execution. Humans do strategy and relationships. If someone's value proposition is primarily execution, AI is competing for their job. And AI is cheaper, faster, and more consistent.

This doesn't make them bad employees. It makes them obsolete for the work that needs doing now.

The transition is uncomfortable. Terminating people who were perfectly adequate by traditional standards feels wrong. But keeping people in roles that don't create value feels worse when you're trying to compete.

The flat organization rewards strategic thinkers who can operate AI systems and win business. Everyone else is overhead that doesn't justify its cost.

Build Your AI-Powered Marketing Career at ACE

The marketing org chart is being rewritten in real time. Traditional roles are disappearing. New capabilities are becoming essential. The Academy of Continuing Education teaches ambitious marketers how to operate in flat, AI-powered organizations where strategic thinking matters more than execution skill. Stop clinging to obsolete structures. Start building the capabilities that actually matter in 2025. Join ACE today.