Long term support and advisory board member of Little Grey cells Club, Cecilia Weckstrom’s latest paper
I had dinner recently with a room full of senior marketers. Smart people. Big brands. The conversation was sharp and almost entirely about tactics — which platforms, what formats, how to outsource faster.
Nobody asked the question underneath: what have you actually built?
Three forces are converging right now that make that question urgent. Social collapsed the funnel. AI is displacing search. And AI agents are starting to make purchasing decisions — not recommendations, transactions. The diagnosis across all three is sharp. But every response I’m seeing follows the same pattern: hire a specialist, buy a tool, outsource the rules.
Each one is an intelligence-layer fix. And AI is coming for intelligence work faster than most marketing leaders have grasped. When the tools handle the doing, what happens to the thinking the doing used to teach?
The full piece maps three converging shifts, the structural gap they’re opening in marketing capability, and the question every CMO should be asking their team on Monday morning.
Read the full piece here.
