Editorial
The Gist
- New CMO mandate. Marketing leaders face pressure to prove value while adapting to AI-driven disruption, regulatory shifts, and customer expectations.
- Flexible team models. Pods, guilds, and modular frameworks help break down silos, speed innovation, and scale collaboration.
- AI + human balance. AI drives scale and speed, while humans ensure strategy, culture, and trust remain intact.
CMOs are facing significant pressure to transform their marketing teams to meet the moment. This mandate is largely attributable to the amplification of everything related to their business: market volatility, competitive pressure, heightened customer expectations, data privacy, regulatory changes and — most notably — AI-driven technological disruption.
On top of these concerns, executive management expects proof of impact that ties growth, resilience and efficiency to measurable strategic value.
Table of Contents
- The New CMO Mandate
- Building Adaptability in Marketing Teams
- Augmenting Human Workflow With AI
- The Future of Human-AI Marketing Collaboration
- FAQ: Evolving Marketing Team Structure
The New CMO Mandate
Historically, many marketing organizations were set up by function (e.g., SEO, content, or product marketing), with each group focusing on its own area and individuals assuming narrowly defined roles. Others adopted a structure where marketing teams were divided by product lines or business units operating mostly independently. For organizations working in a top-down hierarchy, marketing activities flowed through layers of approvals and hand-offs (e.g., from strategy to creative to media buying).
Why Traditional Structures Hold Teams Back
These scenarios share common threads that point to the root causes for the business friction marketing organizations are eager to solve. Siloed team structures and linear workflows prevent you from keeping up with the accelerated pace of business. Specialized talent and layers of approval limit flexibility while dragging on efficiencies. Loose affiliations across business units lead to unshared knowledge and uncoordinated efforts. Ultimately, these hindrances are limiting your team’s ability to thrive and compete.
When it comes to innovating your marketing teams, experts say improving adaptability and speed are the most crucial factors for long-term success — in fact, research shows cross-functional, team-focused approaches can improve efficiency by 30%. Subsequently, forward-looking CMOs are wise to build flexible teams who can experiment, learn, pivot and succeed together.
Related Article: Clear Language Is the Love Language of Customer Experience
Building Adaptability in Marketing Teams
The most effective way to improve adaptability involves building diverse teams with a mix of creative, analytical and technical skills to enable faster problem solving and better innovation. Some CMOs are applying modular team and campaign structures to break down marketing teams into smaller, more flexible units. This enables your teams to move easily between projects, advance new priorities and refine campaigns in real time.
Pods: Cross-Functional Speed Units
Pods refers to small cross-functional teams composed of members with different skill sets (e.g., technical, analytical and creative) — typically, each pod owns the execution of a specific campaign, initiative or customer segment. Because pods are designed to have all competencies needed within the team, they can make better decisions faster, test and learn on the fly and shift focus when appropriate (e.g., test a new product launch for one month and switch to a customer retention initiative for the next month).
Guilds: Shared Learning Communities
Guilds rely on cross-functional communities of practice built around shared interests and expertise such as martech, analytics or content. Unlike pods (which are tasked to deliver outcomes), guilds are structured to foster learning, skill development, collaboration and standardization across the business. Typically, guilds collectively develop, test and refine shared standards (e.g., style guides, measurement frameworks, and QA processes). Applying this knowledge, participants can provide channels for cross-pod pollination, helping teams discover new approaches and avoid duplication.
Modular Campaign Frameworks
Modular campaign frameworks involve breaking content into reusable building blocks. Instead of creating unique assets for each initiative, your teams can assemble campaigns from smaller pieces (e.g., audience segments, creative modules, and messaging snippets). Composable approaches reduce bottlenecks for faster activation and iteration, allowing teams to self-organize around priorities. Applying guild standards for consistency and scalability ensures learnings can be leveraged and success can be replicated quickly and easily.
Augmenting Human Workflow With AI
Human-in-the-loop workflows refer to linking the strengths of human talent and AI to combine automation and augmentation with human oversight and creativity. AI is useful for many purposes, and it’s particularly valuable to marketers in three key areas: research and data gathering, production and campaign optimization.
Research and Data Gathering
During research and data gathering, AI can summarize market trends, scrape competitive intelligence and gain actionable insights from large datasets, enabling your teams to focus their efforts on strategic interpretation and decision-making.
Content Production and Testing
Machine learning tools can automate asset creation, social posts, product descriptions and layouts — advanced content systems can produce many variations for A/B testing at speed. AI models can also handle campaign analytics, optimizing ad spend, segmenting audience and suggesting budget refinements.
Although AI can suggest ideas and copy, it’s up to the humans to manage strategic planning, market prioritization, campaign objectives and investments in innovation. Humans are also essential for things like curating final assets, establishing brand tone, maintaining messaging guidelines and communicating the subtle nuances that differentiate their brands. When it comes to ethics and compliance, humans should be setting the criteria for privacy, data usage, fairness, and representation.
Blended workflows can take many forms. For example, programmatic ad platforms can autonomously shift budgets and test creative in real time. However, it’s the human marketers who monitor these results and intervene when necessary. Some teams create modular content pieces (e.g., images, taglines, and CTAs) using AI tools. From there, the humans select, refine and assemble the modules.
AI can draft responses from customer inquiries from a database containing product information and previous answers — but it’s the human that makes edits when needed and signs off before communications are sent. The technology can triage support tickets, handling basic cases independently but flagging more complex issues (e.g., privacy complaint) for human review and resolution. When it comes to strategic analysis, AI agents can scan performance data and proactively suggest alternative tactics.
However, it’s the humans who make the final calls on launches or campaign pivots.
Related Article: AI in Marketing 2025: Smart Automation and Brave Brand Building
Marketing Team Models Compared
A snapshot of pods, guilds and modular frameworks for adaptable CMOs.
| Model | Focus | Strengths |
|---|---|---|
| Pods | Cross-functional execution teams | Faster decisions, agility, outcome ownership |
| Guilds | Communities of practice | Shared standards, skill development, knowledge transfer |
| Modular Campaigns | Reusable content building blocks | Scalable, faster activation, reduced bottlenecks |
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The Future of Human-AI Marketing Collaboration
Ultimately, the most effective marketing teams in 2025 are deploying AI for speed, scale and precision while reserving human expertise for situations that require discernment (e.g., strategy, culture, and trust). Applying these tools judiciously, your teams are set up to succeed with protecting the brand, maintaining appropriate ethics, and capturing the benefits of automation in production, analytics, and research.
FAQ: Evolving Marketing Team Structure
Editor's note: Marketing team structures are no longer static. CMOs must adapt with flexible models and AI-human collaboration to thrive.
AI accelerates research, automates production and optimizes campaigns. However, human oversight is critical for strategy, ethics and brand trust.
Pods are small cross-functional teams built to execute campaigns, while guilds are communities of practice focused on shared learning and standardization across teams.
CMOs face new pressures around AI, customer expectations and regulations. Modern team structures enable faster adaptation, collaboration and measurable business impact.
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