Under the combined pressure of AI, the demand for immediate profitability, and an increasingly fickle customer base, marketing departments are rethinking their work processes and even their organizational structure. Here are 10 fundamental changes that our experts in Marketing Strategy Consulting are observing in the field:
Summary
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The end of the annual marketing plan, the rise of growth marketing, the integration of generative AI, the convergence of marketing and sales… The 10 trends you need to know to transform how marketing departments are organized.
Contents
1. The Customer at the Heart of the Organization
2. Agility as the New Normal
Large, siloed structures are giving way to multidisciplinary task forces that bring together strategy, product, content, and digital teams: 25% of marketing departments already use some form of agile methodology, and 75% of them report that agile has significantly contributed to achieving their goals, according to the 2026 State of Agile Marketing Report.
3. The End of the Annual Marketing Plan
Time-consuming, inflexible, and sometimes taking 6 to 8 months to develop, the annual marketing plan is giving way to a macro-level roadmap driven by campaigns that are defined and adjusted as they go to drive immediate sales impact.
4. Marketing must prove its value
Marketing departments are being called upon to demonstrate their contribution to results—and even their intrinsic value. This is leading to the development of a culture focused on performance and measurement, the strengthening of management activities and teams, and the creation of “Performance Marketing” departments and “Growth Marketing” roles that are entirely focused on measurement and optimization.
5. Innovation Is Shifting Its Focus to Services
Companies are turning to services to offer a unique experience, generate additional revenue, and reinvent their pricing strategies. These services may replace products, complement the product offering, or take the form of digital services. Entire teams dedicated to designing, enhancing, and promoting these services are emerging. Decathlon is the most successful example of this in the retail sector: repairs, rentals, subscriptions, secondhand goods… The retailer has built a comprehensive service offering backed by its products and supported by dedicated teams. As a result, next-generation services grew by 11.9% in France in 2025, driving the group’s overall growth.
6. MarTech supports all teams
Data and AI are no longer the exclusive domain of digital teams: they are being integrated into all marketing functions to improve targeting, measurement, and optimization. In 2025, the MarTech ecosystem included 15,384 solutions—100 times more than in 2011—driven in particular by the emergence of native AI solutions. (Scott Brinker / State of Martech 2025). Marketing departments are incorporating data and AI experts from other departments into their project teams or even establishing dedicated data and AI teams within their own departments.
7. AI is beginning to replace some of the outsourced services
This is the trend that is having the most direct impact on the advertiser-agency relationship: In the summer of 2025, Carrefour launched the first international TV campaign produced entirely by AI, and L’Oréal created CreAItech, its in-house AI creative lab, which generates thousands of visuals for its brands. As early as 2024, 80% of CMOs reported having deployed generative AI to accelerate their content creation (BCG/ANA, 2024). The prevailing model is not the elimination of agencies, but their transformation: advertisers are bringing mass production in-house and reserving high-value-added creative strategy for agencies.
8. The Major Realignment of Marketing Skills
AI is fundamentally reshaping the marketing skills pyramid. Marketing job postings have fallen by 7% year-over-year, and recruitment of young talent has dropped by 14% compared to 2022: the base of the pyramid is the first to be affected, where AI is already taking over entry-level analysis, mass content production, and reporting (65% of marketing jobs will disappear due to AI by 2026), as well as certain quantitative studies, thanks to the rise of “AI panels” or consumer “digital twins” that simulate how different consumer segments will respond to an innovation.
At the same time, new roles are emerging : AI Marketing Orchestrator, hybrid data/strategy Growth Analyst… These are skills that are still rare in the market, and marketing departments are struggling to attract candidates for these roles in the face of better-resourced in-house Data and Digital teams.
9. Marketing Is Regaining the Upper Hand Over the Customer Experience
Marketing departments include teams dedicated to design and managing the customer experience —such as Customer Experience Managers and UX Strategists—while Customer Relations departments are refocusing on operations.
The Convergence of Marketing, Sales, and Communications
The breakdown of silos between marketing, communications, and sales is accelerating. Companies are strengthening coordination mechanisms between these three functions, often by placing them under the authority of a single member of the executive committee and sometimes even merging certain activities, particularly in B2B environments. In 2024, 41% of companies considered their marketing and sales teams to be aligned, compared to just 20% in 2018 —a notable improvement, even if there is still work to be done. (2024 Sales & Marketing Alignment Barometer, CMIT / Nomination)
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Frequently Asked Questions
Why Are Marketing Organizations Transforming?
How is generative AI transforming the way marketing teams are organized?
What is agile marketing, and why are CMOs adopting it?
Agile Agile marketing replaces rigid annual plans with short-term roadmaps and continuously refined campaigns to maximize the impact on sales. It relies on multidisciplinary task forces that bring together strategy, product, content, and digital teams.
How do marketing departments improve alignment between marketing and sales?
What is MarTech, and what role does it play in transforming marketing organizations?
What mistakes should be avoided in this marketing transformation?
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