Traditional marketing is DEAD. AI now sits at the centre of the GTM engine

RIP Old Ways

I’ve worked across multiple pre-seed, start-up, new-launch and scale-up environments, and for years, the formula barely changed: understand your customer, understand your audience, understand why you win — and then do all the related grunt work. By grunt work I mean manual data investigation. But the truth is this — the old way of operating is over. IT'S DEAD. The foundations haven’t changed, but the engine has. What once relied on manual effort, slow research, and endless drafting is now driven by AI systems that accelerate everything: insight, creation, execution, and decision-making.

And the engine of growth has shifted. Before AI, everything moved through treacle. With AI — and its rapid adoption — the pace has changed. So has the level of competence required. Let me explain.

Before, as a marketeer, every new brief felt like starting from scratch. You’d rummage through old documents, patch them up, and hope they still held together. You’d spend days scanning the market for competitor insight and analysis. ICP and messaging took weeks. Everything was painfully manual. That’s all changed.

Roll forward to now, and my GTM engine has been 10X.

Here’s what I’ve been doing:

I’ve built brand brains — my own living library of assets that learns continuously and updates itself. This means I don’t have to prompt. It knows the tone of voice, it holds all the data, and it has access to the latest sales transcripts. And the brain can run automated competitor analysis, delivering high-quality insight in minutes, not weeks. It can audit website messaging and positioning in seconds. Copy drafts — trained on tone and collateral — appear in minutes. Logos and imagery are created in minutes. Market-dynamics analysis that once took weeks now takes an hour, depending on complexity. Basic website development can be handled by AI in hours and refined in days, not weeks. Messaging and campaign creation now takes days, not months. Asset creation takes hours, not days. Brand playbooks are built in hours rather than weeks. High-intent triggers can be built with AI to understand prospect behaviour — to the point prospects assume you’re cyberstalking them in minutes. Whitepaper outlines are generated in seconds. Website copy and page structures in seconds. Target accounts are no longer strangers — if the data exists, AI can surface it, structure it, and automate the insight. I could go on, but you can see that Lyra (the name of my AI agent) and I work very, very closely.

Why it works — and why it worries me.

It works because AI doesn’t replace your experience; it amplifies it. You can pour years of hard-earned knowledge, customer patterns, and market reading into it, and it learns. Then it collaborates. That’s the key. You teach it and build with it. I’ve spent hours, days, months training it — and sometimes we have real-time battles.

For someone like me — a generalist with a wide view of growth, GTM, positioning, and execution — AI becomes a kind of cognitive exoskeleton. It extends my thinking, speeds up my decision-making, and clears the drudge work that used to slow everything down.

But, as with everything, there’s a downside.

A lot of the work I’d traditionally hand to a junior — the foundational research, the first draft, the competitor scan, the draft briefs — is now being eaten up by AI. And that creates a real skills gap. If AI is doing the groundwork and sitting beside me as a strategic partner, sharpening the higher-level thinking, then why would I hire a junior at all?

That’s the part that scares me.

Marketing roles have always been built on apprenticeship: juniors learning by doing, seniors delegating and shaping. If the early-stage tasks disappear, the next generation has nothing to cut their teeth on. And if we’re not careful, we’ll wake up in five years with a shortage of mid-level talent because we never created the conditions for them to learn. Honestly, I don’t know what to do about this. I can spot a junior’s AI-generated LinkedIn post a mile off when they’ve never been taught how to work with AI. And if we stop hiring for that junior layer, the future talent pipeline looks bleak. Training is crucial.

The centre of gravity has moved, and that’s the truth.

Competence is no longer about producing everything by hand; it’s about clarity of thought, system design, and using AI as an extension of your strategic brain. AI amplifies the quality of experienced thinking in minutes and hours, not days and weeks — if not months. But it needs a sparring partner.

For me, this shift has been utterly game-changing. I now work inside the AI environment as though it’s a collaboration partner — not a tool, but a central part of the go-to-market engine. But the future for new entrants into the marketing industry looks challenging and uncertain. The future of marketing belongs to those who can think with machines, not behind them, and the old way of working is DEAD.