There's a hiring pattern spreading through marketing departments right now that I think is a mistake.
Companies are bringing on GTM engineers. Marketing engineers. AI specialists whose job is to wrangle the technical complexity of the modern marketing stack.
I get the instinct. AI is technical. It feels like you need technical people to make it work.
But I think this is exactly wrong.
The future marketer is a strategist
The most irreplaceable thing a human brings to marketing is creativity, ingenuity, and strategic judgment.
AI needs direction and purpose to be effective. It needs someone who understands the customer, the market, the message. It doesn't need someone who can configure pipelines and stitch APIs together.
The complexity is being engineered away. Vendors are racing to make their solutions turnkey. The tools your team uses in two years will be dramatically easier to operate than the ones you use today. The technical barrier is collapsing.
Which means the scarce, valuable thing — the thing that won't be automated or abstracted — is strategic thinking. Understanding what to say, to whom, and why.
That's a marketer's job. Not an engineer's.
Why building an in-house AI engineering team is a trap
Some CMOs are looking at the AI moment and thinking: I'll just build it ourselves. Hire AI engineers, own the stack, build everything in-house.
I'd push back hard on this.
Ask yourself: is building and maintaining AI infrastructure your core competency? Is it what your marketing team was built to do? Is it where your best people should be spending their time?
The answer is no. And there's a clean economic principle that explains why.
Comparative advantage — explained like you're in 8th grade
Here's a thought experiment.
Imagine two kids in your neighborhood: Alex and Jordan. Alex is fast at everything. Alex can mow lawns faster than Jordan, and also babysit better than Jordan. Alex is genuinely better at both jobs.
So here's the question: should Alex do both jobs themselves?
The answer — and this is the counterintuitive part — is no.
Even though Alex is better at both, Alex's time is finite. Every hour Alex spends mowing lawns is an hour not spent babysitting, where Alex earns more per hour. So Alex should specialize in babysitting and let Jordan handle the lawns. Jordan earns something. Alex earns more. Both come out ahead.
This is comparative advantage. It's not about who's best at something in absolute terms. It's about what you give up when you choose to do one thing instead of another. Economists call that the opportunity cost.
Nations figured this out centuries ago. Portugal and England in the 1800s. Portugal could produce both wine and cloth. England could too. But Portugal was relatively better at wine, and England was relatively better at cloth. So Portugal specialized in wine, England specialized in cloth, and they traded. Both countries ended up with more of both goods than if they'd each tried to produce everything themselves.
The math is almost magical: specialization and trade create wealth that wouldn't otherwise exist.
Now apply this to your marketing department
Your marketing team has a finite number of people, hours, and dollars.
Every engineer you hire is a marketer you didn't hire. Every hour spent configuring infrastructure is an hour not spent on positioning, messaging, and pipeline.
And here's the thing about AI infrastructure: there are vendors who specialize in exactly this. It's their entire business. They have teams of engineers who do nothing but build, maintain, and improve these systems. Their comparative advantage is the technology.
Your comparative advantage is understanding your customer. Knowing what makes them move. Building campaigns that resonate. Creating the strategy that ties it all together.
You shouldn't try to be both. Nobody wins when they try to do everything.
The two questions that matter
Here's how I'd reframe the hiring conversation.
First: what should your marketing team specialize in? The answer should be some version of creative strategy, customer understanding, campaign execution, and pipeline generation. The things that require human judgment, empathy, and domain expertise.
Second: where should you partner? Anywhere technical complexity is high and your team's specialized skill isn't the differentiator. Let vendors, partners, and purpose-built AI products carry that weight.
Build a team of exceptional marketers. Let them use AI as a force multiplier. Stop trying to build the infrastructure yourself.
The best marketing organizations in five years won't be the ones with the best engineers. They'll be the ones with the best strategists — people who knew exactly what to direct AI to do, and had the judgment to know when the output was right.
That's the comparative advantage worth building.
