What you need to know

• AI is upending martech hierarchies says HubSpot’s Scott Brinker, who believes AI will see power shift from centralised service teams to frontline staff empowered by generative tools.
• Speaking at the company's GROW event in Sydney last week, Brinker warned of an increasing gap fuelled by the exponential speed at which AI is evolving, and the slow adaptability of organisations.
• Agility is critical and agile marketing teams using AI for rapid iteration are outperforming peers, and are twice as likely to be deploying production use cases.
• As AI eases production burdens, ops teams are shifting from execution to strategic enablers of experimentation and customisation.
• Customers are becoming co-creators, with Brinker forecasting the next disruption will come from users remixing brand content via personal AI tools, blurring the line between creator and consumer.
• Marketing operations must evolve from precision workflows to adaptive systems that are able to manage complexity, instead of just executing processes.
• AI’s real promise, says Brinker, lies in democratising innovation across the organisation, amplifying the creative capacity of anyone with insight and initiative.

The service bureau is dead. Long live frontline martech. Generative AI isn’t just automating tasks or juicing campaign velocity, it’s torching the old marketing command-and-control model. In its place is a creative free-for-all where the most agile teams win, operations turn strategic, and even your customers start remixing your brand assets. The age of centralised martech power is over. The frontlines just became the main event.

Scott Brinker, HubSpot’s VP platform ecosystem, is famous for tracking the inexorable rise of the martech ecosystem. He is now pushing a more important message: It’s not just the explosion of platforms that matters now, it’s who’s using them. Speaking to marketers and other martech professionals at the company’s Grow event in Sydney recently, Brinker told the attendees, “We're living in an age of AI where now every employee has the potential to be a creator.”

Historically, creative and technical capability in marketing was controlled by specialist cores, IT, marketing ops, and centralised creative teams. AI has detonated that hierarchy. Brinker’s own team at HubSpot illustrates the shift. They trained AI models like Claude to build joint value propositions, design co-branded events, generate full campaign sequences, even write Slack messages for sales teams.

“My point is to start experimenting with these tools for various activities you might want to do in your job. I think you'd be surprised at how well they can work," he said. 

The result of all this experimentation is that frontline marketers, partner managers, sales reps, and customer success agents will be able to generate high-quality outputs, autonomously, without traditional gatekeepers.

Exponential AI, logarithmic humans

Brinker’s long held view is that technology evolves rapidly, while human systems, by contrast, develop much more slowly. He saw this being supercharged by AI fuelled acceleration.

“One of the things we've wrestled with in marketing over the past couple of decades is the incredible rate of change. In general, technology has been evolving at an exponential pace. At the core of this is Moore's Law: Computing power doubling every 18 months for many decades. We thought that was fast," Brinker said. "But these LLMs, the frontier models for AI, are actually doubling in performance every seven months... The challenge here is we human beings, particularly groups of human beings as an organisation, tend not to change at an exponential rate.”

Brinker called this “the quintessential management challenge in the 21st Century.”

“The metaphor that comes to mind is like having one foot on the dock and one foot on the ferry." Adding a yoga analogy, he said, "You can really feel the burn trying to manage this.”

Alas, those seeking silver bullets will be disappointed. Instead, Brinker offered two hard-won strategies: “First is to just be very intentional and strategic about which changes to embrace," he advised.

"Second... some companies are better at changing than others. They're more agile. If you're able to just be a little more adaptable, a little bit faster than your competitor, that can often be all you need to have a really significant competitive advantage.”

Speaking with Mi3 after his keynote, Brinker said, "Marketers are often hesitant to make decisions with imperfect information, but unfortunately, that doesn't work in an environment where things are moving so quickly."

And he suggested the need for agility will also drive choices about the tech stack, with a greater preference for composable architectures. "This is the whole idea of composability," as marketers will need to move beyond rigid systems and operating models.

Agile Marketing: Why AI favours the fast

Brinker repeatedly returned to one essential idea: AI changes the economics of experimentation. AI’s real value isn’t just cost reduction. It’s accelerating creative iteration at a scale previously impossible. 

“The best way to have a good idea is to just have a lot of ideas," he said. “At the risk of offending the marketers in the audience... it's actually very hard to normally guess whether something's going to work, or how well it's going to work. You kind of have to get it out there and try it.”

Agile marketing teams, the kind who utilise things like sprints, Kanban boards, and short iterative loops, are already rapidly pulling away, he suggested. Quoting a study by Agile Sherpa, Brinker noted, “Teams that were fully using these agile methods were almost twice as far along in not just experimenting with AI, but actually getting into production use cases.”

“None of these things are rocket science,” he said. “But they're basically designed to be a management operating system to emphasise speed and iteration.”

AI and Agile are, as Brinker puts it, “the perfect match.”

As to where to prioritise, Brinker's views are consistent with others in the market, and he told Mi3: "If you aren't doing that yet, now at least somewhat low hanging fruit to start with around sales, service and marketing."

But there's another suggestion. "To me, the analysis side [of LLMs] is still one of the underutilised capabilities."

AI’s democratisation of creativity is also smashing long-standing creative bottlenecks, according to Brinker. 

“Creativity is kind of magical. It's mystical... But when we're relying on the centralised team to do most of the creative work for us... we're only tapping into a small number of people. As we start to empower more and more people throughout the organisation to do this, the diversity [across] the range of concepts and ideas that we can tap into expands tremendously," he said. 

Brinker cited Shopify’s CEO mandating that every employee learn how to apply AI to their job. “This is a push, and maybe for some people it’s an uncomfortable push... But boy, having the CEO get that mandate also helps push back the barriers for all those folks that we're empowering who previously, when they had an idea, were probably told, ‘No, no, that's not your job’.”

It was at this stage of Brinker’s presentation that the long-put upon bank sector marketing exec sitting beside Mi3 sighed that she was expected to do 10 AI-powered things a day by her employer, as if her day wasn’t busy enough.

The creative power of AI self-service emerges when the person closest to the business problem can solve it directly, continued Brinker. 

“When the person who feels the pain is also empowered to build a solution, that's when something magical and utterly unique happens. It's the people on the front lines who truly understand the pain of their job, their team's job, or a specific customer experience. Empowering them to solve those problems makes all the difference.”

From production to architecture

Brinker also noted that while marketing operations historically lived in the shadows of production and analysis, that is now likely to change with AI.

“If there are any marketing ops people in the room, they’d probably say that, generally speaking, we’re under-resourced and underappreciated, especially within the larger organisation." Now, he argued, AI is dismantling the production burden that dominated ops teams.

“What’s happening with AI is that it’s really changing the dynamics of production and analysis, driving the greatest acceleration and efficiency improvements.”

Smart companies, Brinker said, won’t just pocket those savings: “The competitive advantage comes with what do you do with that?”

Per Brinker: The smartest companies will take the resources they've freed up and reinvest them into strategy and creativity, especially by ramping up experimentation, moving faster, and diving into more specialised approaches.

And ops teams will increasingly own the AI-powered infrastructure that enables those higher-level capabilities, he said.

Customers as co-creators

Crystal balling a bit further, Brinker suggested the next disruption will come from outside the enterprise. “It's not just everyone in our company who can be creators. It's increasingly our customers who can also be creators with our content,” he said offering examples of how customers will remix brand content on their own terms using personal AI agents.

“One example, I took this exact presentation, which was a Google Slide, and uploaded it to Google’s Notebook LLM. You can give it documents, and it creates an interactive bot you can ask questions. You can even say, ‘Can you generate a podcast of a couple of people talking through this material?’ because that’s how I prefer to consume it.”

No more linear marketing ops

For years, marketers optimised operations like precision machinery, he said. “This is actually how a lot of marketing and revenue operations have been run over the past decade. It tends to be a fairly complicated machine, but it's very precise.”

But that is set to change as AI creates a different management landscape, one where the goal is about managing complexity over complication. “Marketing, revenue operations... we have to start to think about how do we treat this as a more complex ecosystem environment.”

Instead of relying on rigid, fixed processes for everything, we need to start thinking about giving people more flexibility, but within guardrails, Brinker advised. Rather than sticking to the same monthly reports, we should approach this with a sense of responsiveness, detecting patterns and adapting as we go. In other words, where marketing once prioritised stability, adaptability must now take its place.

Brinker’s message is blunt: AI will not simply make marketing faster or cheaper. It will dismantle hierarchies, restructure operations, and redefine how both employees and customers engage with content.

“This is the most creative and highest performing time ever in the history of marketing across an incredible range,” Brinker concluded. "The creative possibilities are enormous, with a huge acceleration in creative speed. There's an amazing diversity of ideas. In the age of AI, every employee has the potential to be a creator, just like you."