Internal marketing teams are having their ‘agency moment’. AI is about to force the next reckoning
Opinion
Aviva’s Stuart McDonald from the ISBA Media Leaders group discusses how the next generation of internal marketing teams will not be defined by how much they produce, but by how effectively they bring it all together.
Inside large, complex organisations, marketing teams are being asked to move faster, prove more value, and simplify an ever-expanding ecosystem of channels, platforms, and demands. As AI shifts from experimentation into daily operations, marketing is approaching its most significant operating model reset in decades, one that will expose outdated ways of working and reward teams prepared to rethink their role.
For years, internal marketing teams were criticised for being too slow, too tactical, or too dependent on agencies to deliver impact. Today, the risk has inverted.
In-house teams now produce more content, run more campaigns, own more channels, and manage more technology than ever before — yet many are drifting towards becoming high-throughput execution engines rather than strategic growth partners. At the same time, AI is accelerating straight through the middle of the function.
AI isn’t arriving to help marketing do what it already does. It’s arriving to expose what marketing should never have been doing in the first place.
Pre-pandemic, marketing was busy. Not always effective
Before Covid, marketing work was organised around channels and outputs. Success was measured in activity: campaigns launched, content published, and leads generated. The operating model was linear: plan, create, launch, report, repeat.
This structure emerged as a response to an explosion of platforms and customer touchpoints. The job was to keep up. But it also created fragility. Teams became overloaded with manual work. Strategy sat upstream, execution downstream, and insight often arrived too late to influence decisions. Marketing stayed busy but not always effective.
This drift was reinforced by how performance was measured and incentivised. Over time, value came to be defined by what was easiest to track rather than what mattered most.
Attention slid towards the bottom of the funnel, where attribution was clearer and results more immediate. The longer this persisted, the harder it became to escape.
The metrics used to prove effectiveness locked teams into demonstrating short-term efficiency at the expense of long-term impact. Marketing’s role narrowed from shaping future demand to optimising what sat directly in front of it.
The pandemic didn’t create change, it removed the excuses
When the pandemic hit, planning cycles collapsed. Customer behaviour shifted faster than decks could be updated. Budgets tightened while expectations increased.
Teams that adapted didn’t do so by working harder. They stripped out friction. Approval chains shortened. Dependency on external partners has reduced. Assets were reused. Focus narrowed to work that genuinely moved the needle.
Marketing became less of a service function and more of an operational partner — closer to revenue, customer experience, and decision-making. Many teams never fully returned to their old ways of working.
The pandemic wasn’t the catalyst. It was the stress test.
Operations, data, and accountability moved to the centre
Over the last five years, marketing operations has shifted from a support role to the backbone of high-performing teams. Without the discipline it brings, modern marketing collapses under its own complexity.
Teams invested heavily in CRM integration, automation, analytics, and measurement — often learning that more tools do not equal better outcomes. The real progress came from designing systems that could scale without slowing everything down.
This shift also changed what mattered. Commercial literacy became more important. Insight mattered more. Being able to explain why something worked — or didn’t — became as valuable as launching it.
Then AI stopped being theoretical
AI has existed in marketing for years, largely embedded inside platforms and algorithms. What’s changed is visibility and accessibility. AI is now woven directly into day-to-day workflows.
Tasks that once absorbed hours — drafting copy, generating variations, analysing performance, building segments — no longer do. And that’s where the disruption begins.
Because when execution becomes abundant, a harder question emerges: what is the marketer actually there to do?
The execution myth is finally breaking
For years, marketing teams justified their size and structure around execution. More channels require more people. More content meant more production. More reporting demanded more manual effort.
AI dismantles that logic.
Execution is becoming cheaper, faster, and more plentiful. The constraint is no longer output — it’s judgment. Direction. Prioritisation. Synthesis.
This is uncomfortable for teams that still measure value by volume. It’s liberating for those ready to change.
AI doesn’t remove the need for marketers. It removes the hiding places.
We are entering the orchestration era
The next generation of internal marketing teams will not be defined by how much they produce, but by how effectively they bring it all together.
That means designing systems rather than running tasks. Directing AI rather than competing with it. Spending more time deciding what not to do. Moving faster without losing coherence or control.
Roles built around “doing” will shrink. Expectations will shift towards sensemaking, decision quality, experimentation, and ethical oversight.
Why most teams will struggle with this shift
The greatest risk isn’t adopting AI too slowly. It’s adopting it without changing how work gets done.
Layering AI onto broken processes simply creates faster chaos — more content, more noise, and the same strategic confusion underneath.
Teams that succeed will do a few unglamorous things exceptionally well: invest in clean, connected data; define clear decision rights between humans and machines; build AI literacy across the team; set guardrails for brand, ethics, and quality; and measure impact, not output.
None of this is flashy. All of it is essential.
The leadership challenge is the real challenge
This moment demands more from marketing leaders than tool adoption or capability building. It demands clarity of intent.
What is marketing for in your organisation?
Where does it create leverage rather than volume?
Which decisions must remain human — and which should never be manual again?
These are operating model questions, not technology ones.
A final provocation
AI is not the future of marketing. It is the pressure test.
The teams that emerge strongest will be those that stop mistaking activity for value, execution for impact, and speed for progress and instead, build marketing functions designed for judgment, adaptability, and growth.
The era of busy marketing is ending.
The era of intelligent marketing is just beginning.
Stuart McDonald is head of marketing planning, performance & analysis for Aviva. He is also deputy chair of the ISBA Media Leaders working group.