The Org Chart Is Past Tense

The standard org chart conversation is the wrong conversation. Most CMOs are still asked to refresh the boxes, redraw reporting lines, and explain why headcount needs to grow or shrink in the next planning cycle. It is a procedural exercise. It is also a low-consequence one.

The question that matters for the next twelve months is whether the org chart is still the right map. The unit of labour inside marketing has changed. Specialists are becoming orchestrators. Tasks are taking precedence over titles. AI is restructuring what a person actually does inside an eight-hour day. The organisation that funds its 2026 marketing plan on a 2019 org chart is paying for capacity the work chart has already absorbed.

This is not a human resources question. It is a capital allocation question. The CMO who continues to hire by job description and pay for headcount by function is over-funding capability that AI has compressed, and under-funding the orchestration layer where commercial value now compounds. The pattern is consistent across the interviews. Six practitioners, working across enterprise software, B2B SaaS, agency platforms, measurement, and the supply side of media, have converged on the same conclusion. The org chart is past tense.

The org chart was designed for a different century of work

Ruslan Tovbulatov, CMO of Gloat, has been the most direct of any practitioner on the question. Gloat builds work-orchestration software for enterprises including Mastercard, Spotify, Novartis, Standard Chartered, Nestlé and PepsiCo. Tovbulatov is professionally fluent in the question because his company sells the answer.

The org chart, in Tovbulatov's reading, was a command-and-control instrument built to move instructions efficiently down a hierarchy. It made sense when work was standardised, careers were linear, and the unit of management was a person inside a job description that held for years.

None of those conditions still hold inside a marketing function. People work across time zones and teams. They are pulled into projects from other departments. The boundary between roles is no longer a useful thing to enforce.

AI inside the team has rewritten what every role does

The reason the work chart matters is that the work itself has been reorganised. AI is not replacing the marketer. It is replacing some of the marketer's component tasks and amplifying the rest. The marketer who used to be a content writer is no longer a content writer. Tovbulatov retitled his entire marketing team at Gloat to reflect the change.

The implication sits on the personnel budget line. If a content writer is now also a strategist, a drafter, and a production lead, the question of what to budget for in 2026 stops being a head-count question and starts being a capability question. The headline is not that AI replaces the writer. The headline is that AI dissolves the writer's job description into a sequence of tasks the orchestrator now owns end to end.

The same shift shows up from several angles. Martin Kihn, SVP Strategy at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, describes a cascading-agent architecture that replicates in agent form what once took weeks of coordination across separate specialists. Andrew Bialecki at Klaviyo calls the marketer of the next cycle an editor-in-chief: reviewing work, not originating it.

Timo Weis, Global Head of Growth at Infosys, gives the timing version. Tasks that took weeks ten years ago now take minutes, and the review takes longer than the creation. Each description points to the same thing. The unit of labour is the workflow, not the role.

Why the 2019 org chart costs more than the 2026 work chart

Maintaining the old org chart in 2026 produces three predictable misallocations. Each shows up on the marketing P&L without being named as such.

The first is duplicated capability. When the role is the unit of management, the organisation hires multiple specialists to cover what is now a single orchestrator workflow. Three writers, two designers, an editor, a strategist, a campaign manager. The same workflow, under the work chart, is one orchestrator and one set of tools. The duplication is invisible until the budget review forces the question.

The second is frozen agency lines. Agencies were retained against a job-description model of what marketing teams could not do in-house. That model has compressed. Andrew McCormick, formerly Chief Growth Officer at Dentsu X, frames the agency boundary differently from how the in-housing debate is usually framed.

McCormick's case is for strong capability in-house, plus an agency on hand to scale up and down. The point is the same as Tovbulatov's: the boundary is task-defined, not function-defined. The agency line is no longer where the work was last decade.

Pay retainer fees against a function the in-house orchestrator now covers and you are funding obsolete capacity. Ask the agency to scale a workflow that should have been brought inside and you are funding the wrong line in the other direction.

The third misallocation is wrong-currency performance reviews. The org chart asks managers to evaluate people against a job description. The work chart asks managers to evaluate people against an outcome. Performance reviews that score the writer for "good writing" without reference to the orchestration outcome are a leading indicator of misaligned compensation, retention risk, and promotion error. The organisation is paying for the wrong thing and saying so out loud once a year.

The most under-funded function inside the modern marketing organisation

Marketing operations is the function most consistently under-budgeted in the 2026 marketing organisation, and it is also the function on which everything else now depends. Until recently it was a back-office utility. In 2026 it is one of the two functions that determines whether a marketing organisation can be funded, measured, or trusted by the CFO. The other is brand.

Mark Debenham, who leads growth marketing at Adverity, runs a team explicitly structured around the two-function view. Growth marketing on one side, marketing operations on the other. The operations team owns HubSpot automation, email workflows, reporting, CRM data integrity and product integration. Growth owns the demand side. There is no third function. Debenham's structure is one of the cleanest expressions of the work chart inside an established B2B marketing team.

Vitaly Pecherskiy, CEO of StackAdapt, runs a fifty-person marketing team across digital marketing, event marketing, marketing operations, design, and regional coverage. He is explicit that operations is one of the keys to the function's success, because it is the layer that lets the rest of the team interrogate the data the function is producing. Operations is no longer a back-office utility. It is the substrate that makes the orchestration layer possible.

The org chart does not have a slot for this function at the right level. The work chart does. The CMO who allocates an operations head with a small team buried under digital is under-investing the function the rest of the marketing organisation now sits on top of. The CFO who is asked to fund growth without funding operations is being asked to buy a ceiling without a floor.

What re-internalises, what gets cut, what stays

The agency conversation has been re-opened by the same shift. The in-housing debate of the last decade was usually framed as a binary. Either build the team inside or pay an external partner. The work chart reframes the question. Soizic Sycamore, Managing Director at Plan.Net Group, makes the agency-side argument that the answer is both, structured against the work rather than the function.

The dividing line is no longer brand versus media, or strategy versus execution. It is which tasks compound when held inside and which lose efficiency at internal scale. SEO, content production, social, paid acquisition, owned channel optimisation and product marketing tend to compound when held inside.

Specialist creative production, deep market research, brand reinvention, complex programmatic and the broader advisory role tend to compound when bought from outside. The work chart maps cleanly onto this distinction. The org chart obscures it.

Virginie Chesnais, CMO at Happydemics, has built a team structure that reflects the same logic. One team of four runs demand generation. A brand manager and a communications and events manager run the brand-amplification side. The CRO and the CMO co-created the wider commercial strategy. The strategy was not the agency's. The agency's job is the part of the work that does not compound internally.

For the CMO, the implication is procedural. The annual agency review is no longer a procurement exercise about whether the existing roster is paid the right amount. It is a structural exercise about which workflows belong inside the work chart and which belong outside it. The retainer model is the casualty of the shift. Not because retainers are wrong, but because the unit of agency engagement is now the workflow rather than the function.

What changes inside recruitment, review and compensation

The hiring process is where the old org chart most visibly persists. Job descriptions are written against the function. Compensation bands are set against the function. Promotion ladders are designed against the function. The CMO who wants to operate against the work chart has to redesign the recruitment process to reflect that.

Three changes recur across the conversations. The first is the orchestrator-first job description. Hire for the workflow, not the title. A 2026 marketing job description that lists three specialist tasks and a list of tools is hiring for the wrong unit. A description that lists three workflows the role is accountable for is hiring against the work chart.

The second is the behaviour filter. The skills that mattered last year are not the skills that matter next year, and the work chart will keep moving. Hiring for ownership, curiosity, integrity and the ability to learn the next tool is the only way to recruit against a function whose component tasks will be different in eighteen months. This was also the strongest signal from the contributors to Issue No. 09 on the CMO as General Manager.

The third is the compensation rewrite. If the workflow is the unit of work, the compensation system needs to reward workflow outcomes. The orchestrator who produces three campaigns end-to-end is not on the same compensation curve as the orchestrator who produces six. The annual review built around a job description is the wrong instrument. The work chart needs the compensation system to match.

The CMO who can defend each row of the right-hand column in front of the CFO is running an operating model the board can fund. The CMO still operating on the left is funding last decade's structure at this decade's prices.

Contributing Practitioners

The voices behind this piece

This analysis is built from long-form interviews conducted on The Business of Marketing podcast with six senior practitioners on team structure, marketing operations, the agency line, and the operating model implications of AI inside the marketing function.

Ruslan Tovbulatov

Chief Marketing Officer

Gloat

Mark Debenham

Growth Marketing

Adverity

Vitaly Pecherskiy

Chief Executive Officer

StackAdapt

Virginie Chesnais

Chief Marketing Officer

Happydemics

Andrew McCormick

Former Chief Growth Officer

Dentsu X

Soizic Sycamore

Managing Director

Plan.Net Group