POV

I wrote Marketing Rebuilt around a question I've been wrestling with. We know B2B marketing needs to change now that AI agents are joining the team. But HOW do you rebuild a marketing organization when the technology, roles, and rules are still changing?

That's what this book is about. A practical way to rebuild marketing around people and AI agents, with signals starting the work, agents handling more of it, and people making the big calls and owning the results. All focused on driving pipeline and revenue.

What we're seeing

You can see it starting. AI agents are taking on real work inside rules your people set, and more of that work starts with signals. A target account that looked at three pages of your site last month looks at seventeen this week. Catch that moment, and an agent can act while it matters, with a person deciding which signals count and owning what happens next. Making this work takes a new operating model: Signals initiate. Agents execute. Humans govern.

A pile of agents isn't an engine

I learned why design matters years before agents showed up. We were launching a major product, with twelve people across content, demand gen, sales, and ABM. Three days in, a VP of sales called me. "Why is your team emailing my enterprise accounts with mid-market messaging?" ABM and demand gen had sent conflicting emails to the same buyers a day apart. Each team ran its playbook well. We'd just never made anyone responsible for connecting them. It was our biggest campaign of the year. We left pipeline on the table, looked pretty silly, and that one was on me.

Give twelve agents those same broken handoffs and they'll make the same mess, only faster. AI needs the right strategy, processes, and framework connecting the work.

The AI Marketing Engine

I've been building this framework since 2018, when I published The Marketing Engine on LinkedIn. It evolved into The Growth Engine in 2020, and now it's the AI Marketing Engine, rebuilt for people and agents working together. It organizes B2B marketing into ten connected capabilities, from Positioning and Brand to Pipeline Generation and Engine Operations, with AI agents working across all of them. The responsibilities will look familiar, and they're still the job. What changes is how the work starts, who does it, and how it all connects. 

100 ways to put agents to work

The book includes 100 agent-powered use cases across the engine, each with the same anatomy: the challenge, what the agent does, the signals that trigger it, and where people stay in charge. Take a late-stage deal that goes quiet. The CFO stops opening emails, someone from IT starts reading your security docs, and the buyer keeps going back to the pricing page. A few agents working together connect those signals, pull the right financial proof and security content, and tee up a recommended next step. The rep reviews it, adds what only the rep knows, and makes the call. That's marketing staying in the deal long after the opportunity was created, and it has its own chapter in the book, Revenue Acceleration. Agents make that kind of support possible across far more deals than a marketing team could manage by hand.

Pipeline is the point

Here's the part we care most about: PIPELINE. Every capability should help create, accelerate, or expand pipeline without spending the trust your brand has earned. And leadership needs one Scoreboard, built on the CFO's numbers, that answers three questions: Are we winning? Does the room trust the number? Is the engine getting stronger?

Building engines this way, we've consistently doubled pipeline in the first six months, and sometimes grown it 3x, 4x, even 5x. We did all of that before AI agents joined the team. Imagine what we can deliver now.

People lead the rebuild

A lot of marketers are asking themselves some version of "Am I still relevant?" There's no question AI is changing work we've spent our careers learning to do. So is AI going to make good marketers irrelevant? I don't think so. Some roles have already changed, and some work will go away. But I've seen good people become more valuable when they learn to run the system, lead the agents, make the judgment calls, and own the outcome.

That's the human side of this book, and it matters as much as the agents do. Call it change management, transformation, or whatever you want. We've been through big shifts before, like the digital era. Helping people through the change is just as important now.

Where to start the rebuild

You don't need to rebuild everything at once. Keep the good people and systems you already have, and pick one problem in the engine to fix first, like stalled deals or a pipeline source that's underperforming. Give it one owner and one pipeline number, run it for 90 days, then scale it, fix it, or stop it.

Plan on 12 to 18 months for a full rebuild, depending on where you're starting. Start small, but have a plan for where you want to go. At the pace this is moving, I expect the next edition of the book sooner than any of us think, which is one more reason not to wait.

As I wrote at the end of Marketing Rebuilt, the goal is to build something that lasts. A marketing engine that keeps producing long after you've moved on. That's the kind of rebuild worth doing.

Let's keep rebuilding!

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