In the marketing world's mad dash to bolt AI onto every tool, the focus has been on efficiency. But the real story—and the bigger disruption—isn't what AI is doing to tasks, but what it's doing to teams. The marketing department as we know it may be the first casualty.

Alex Long, a leader with a no-nonsense approach to marketing operations, has a unique perspective on the real impact of AI. Her experience revamping complex systems at companies like Korn Ferry, and now as a Senior Manager Marketing Operations at AlphaSense, suggests the biggest changes aren't coming for our tech stacks, but for something far more fundamental.

"The biggest initial impact may be a complete restructuring of how we align our teams organizationally," Long says. "We're moving into a position where we'll see a lot more editing happening, as opposed to pure creation. You may not need multiple copywriters for everything anymore because your Joe Schmo in Demand Gen now has access to ChatGPT and can spin something up."

Pod people: Long predicts this change will dismantle traditional, functionally-siloed marketing departments where demand gen, product marketing, and content operate in separate lanes. In their place, she envisions more agile, cross-functional "pod structures," similar to how many sales and engineering organizations are aligned. "You have your more senior people, you have your more junior people, and this whole group works together regularly," she explains. "It’s a fundamental change to how we align projects and campaigns."

Tribal knowledge: Counterintuitively, Long believes that as AI automates more work, the need for human-held institutional knowledge becomes more important, not less. Without a clear record of the "why" behind a system's design, teams risk letting an AI optimize itself into breaking something critical. "When you start letting AI take over, it’s going to require more tribal knowledge, or at least really good documentation of it," she warns. "You have to know what the original parameters set on the AI were and, more importantly, why we set them. Was it an abundance of caution or for a specific reason?"