Building an AI-enabled marketing team

A guide for marketing execs

Only 5 marketers are needed for startups generating $100M in revenue.

Now that I’ve got your attention, it’s time to explain why marketing teams will never look the same. Gone are the days of bloated teams with media buyers, email marketers, and designers all siloed off. Small, AI-enabled teams now win.

At Postmates in 2019, we generated $300 million in revenue with a 30-person marketing team. This included 3 senior marketing execs, 8 media buyers, 5 lifecycle marketers, 2 copywriters, 2 designers, 2 data analysts, 2 social marketers, 2 brand marketers, 2 influencer marketers, 1 SEO marketer and 1 data scientist. If we were scaling now, I’d be willing to bet we could have had the same output with less than 10 marketers.

Example structure of a mature growth team of twenty.

So what does an AI-enabled marketing team look like?

This modern marketing team will include: Lead, Executor, Creative, Architect and Operator.

1. Lead: Marketing executive (Head of Growth)

2. Executor: Offshore marketer

3. Creative: Brand/ creative marketer

4. Architect: Growth analyst or engineer

5. Operator: Growth operations specialist

AI-enabled growth team of five.

A few consideration points:

1. As your AI workforce grows, so does the need for brand safeguards and prompt libraries

2. Not all marketing teams are created equal, but this should be the basis for the 90%

3. I'm not accounting for events/ partnership roles as they can often sit within sales

4. If you need living proof, I’m currently implementing this structure at my startup

5. Junior marketers will take on new roles in new marketing team structure

Okay, let’s dive into what a modern marketing team will look like in 2025 and beyond.

Layer 1: Your human foundation (2 people)

Marketing budgets are tightening. Performance expectations are rising. And AI is evolving faster than org charts can keep up. The traditional 15-person team is no longer competitive—what matters is speed, adaptability, and leverage. This guide shows how to build that.

At the very core, every successful startup will require a marketing executive to orchestrate the entire operation. This will not change in the new modern team structure.

Responsibilities

This is your quarterback—the first and most critical hire. They own strategy, growth roadmap, and martech design. They possess the experience and understanding of what’s needed and how to evaluate new tools for the stack (including AI tools). Unless your founding team has an exceptional marketer in place, this should be the first hire made for the marketing org. The marketing exec's five main objectives:

1. Own the end-to-end growth strategy

2. Build and manage the MarTech stack

3. Set up attribution frameworks

4. Evaluate and integrate AI tools

5. Oversee channel performance

In addition, every marketing org will have at minimum one offshore marketer (note: I’m helping companies hire offshore marketers at GrowthPair). I will personally never build a company without offshore marketing talent.

Responsibilities

Offshore marketers will be the Executor that runs all the daily optimizations on the campaigns that are running–whether this is AB testing lifecycle campaigns or creative testing on Meta. Gone are the days of hiring $70k junior marketers fresh out of college to run email campaigns. Instead, we’ll have an experienced offshore marketer based in Brazil or Philippines at $40k/ year with 5+ years of experience.

With my last startup (exited at $3.5M ARR), it was myself as the Lead for our marketing org, along with two offshore marketers (Executors). It worked like magic. The offshore marketers had years of experience at companies like IMAX and Warner Bros before joining me and hit the ground running with all the day-to-day marketing operations.

With the foundational layer in place, you can get pretty far before having to add the rest of the team elements. With this foundation established, here's where the model gets revolutionary: your next three 'hires' won't be human.

Layer 2: Your AI employees (3-4 specialists)

The traditional playbook says 'hire a junior copywriter.' The 2025 playbook says 'deploy an AI copywriter.' Instead of adding more human bodies to the team, the future will be adding AI bodies, which I’ll refer to as AI employees. Before teams think of adding their Creative, Architect and Operator, they should look into how AI employees can augment their team.

Responsibilities

These AI employees will do what junior marketers, copywriters and analysts once did:

• AI strategist → Generate a weekly media plan from last month's ad performance

• AI copywriter → Write 10 subject lines based on last week's open rates

• AI designer → Generate image variants using top-performing ad templates

• AI analyst → Flag underperforming campaigns in a Slack channel with a fix suggestion

I’m calling these AI employees because they should be evaluated and trained just as any human employee is. The more time you spend enriching these AI employees with data and knowledge about your startup, the more valuable and efficient they’ll become.

It’s not enough to just set an AI employee up in a few minutes and forget about it. Marketing teams should constantly be upskilling via new knowledge and better prompting (can be thought of as management).

By way of example, training looks like giving your AI designer access to a database of top-performing ads, tagging creative by theme and format, and prompting regularly based on real campaign results. It’s no different than onboarding a human teammate.

While AI handles execution, three roles remain distinctly human.

Layer 3: The irreplaceable humans

A few human roles remain resistant to AI replacement, though they'll evolve significantly for fresh grads and skilled marketers alike.

These roles include Creative, Architect and Operator.

Creative: Your ideas brain

AI is only as good as the individual prompting and the ideas in their mind. This is why we will still have creative visionaries that lead branding, marketing ideas that touch human emotion and overall feel of campaigns.

Operator: Your AI workforce manager

Your Operator will be the manager for all of your AI employees, liaison between contractors/ vendors you’re working with. This role is most known as “Growth Ops” on mature growth teams today, and should evolve to managing the new AI employees. This involves connecting your AI employees with campaign data and your marketing knowledgebase to continue to empower them to run smarter for the team.

Architect: Your system connector

The Architect will manage all data, attribution and overall connections between the infrastructure within your MarTech stack. This doesn’t need to be a full-time role until the stack and/ or data gets complex enough to require it. For example, if your startup is just using a CRM and an email service provider (i.e., Beehiv), then this role can wait. Add this role when managing 5+ integrated tools or complex attribution models.

The new marketing dream team

We’re living in such exciting times where marketing orgs will be leaner, but at the same time, even smarter and more efficient than before.

For early-stage ($0-$10M revenue), startups can begin with:

• 1 Director of Growth (Lead)

• 1 Offshore marketer (Executor)

• AI employees (Copy, design, analyst)

As you grow past $10M in revenue, you can start adding the following:

• 1 Creative visionary

• 1 Operator (AI employee manager)

• 1 Architect (Data/ attribution lead)

Economics and transition ideas

With leaner teams, the question leadership may be asking is, “How much can we save with reduced headcount within the marketing org?”

When you start drawing the old structure out against the new AI-enabled marketing team, it almost looks unbelievable. Below is how my Postmates growth team was structured versus what it could have looked like in this new world:

30-person marketing org: $2.5M annually

- 3 senior marketing execs ($200k each) = $600k

- 8 media buyers ($75k each) = $600k

- 5 lifecycle marketers ($75k each) = $375k

- 2 copywriters ($70k each) = $140k

- 2 designers ($70k each) = $140k

- 2 data analysts ($80k each) = $160k

- 2 social marketers ($65k each) = $130k

- 2 brand marketers ($70k each) = $140k

- 2 influencer marketers ($65k each) = $130k

- 1 SEO marketer ($70k) = $70k

- 1 data scientist ($120k) = $120k

AI-enabled 8-person team: ~$700k annually

- 1 senior marketing exec ($200k) = 200k

- 2 offshore Executors ($40k each) = 80k

- 2 Operators ($100k each) = 200k

- 1 Creative visionary ($100k) = 100k

- 1 Architect ($100k) = 100k

- AI tools ($20k annually) = 20k

Savings: $1.8M annually (72% reduction)

Another big consideration point for currently-bloated teams is how they can make this transition easier. Transitioning from a 30-person team requires difficult workforce decisions, but natural progression pathways exist:

• Junior marketers → Operators

• Data analysts → Architects

• Designers → Creatives

This isn't a theory. I’m building this now at GrowthPair. It’s more scalable, cost-effective, and performance-oriented than any team I’ve seen before.

The companies implementing this structure now will have an 18-month competitive advantage before it becomes table stakes. The question isn't whether your team will eventually look like this, but whether you'll lead the transition or be forced into it.