As I stated on LinkedIn last week, it was a wild week of news. Lee Hammond mapped the chaos in a post on LinkedIn after his visit to CDP World, while David Raab imagined the redesign after challenging ChatGPT. And somewhere between the two, I found myself in a demo with Aampe, realizing just how hard it is to think differently.

Towards the end, I stopped Aampe’s Amaan Kulatunga and admitted, almost out loud:

I’m still trying to fit this into campaign logic.

I was still thinking like a marketer from 2015. And that, I suspect, is what most teams are struggling with right now.

From AI as tool to AI as team member

We’ve treated AI as the next automation layer, something to optimize what we already do. I wrote about this at length in my previous post venting some light frustration about the focus on AI as a feature, brought to market by many Martech vendors. But as Raab wrote in his recent blog post, AI-native marketing isn’t just a faster version of the old process, but rather a self-correcting system that learns and adapts (or at least, it should be). The problem is that the organization around it often doesn’t.

During the Aampe demo, which I just recorded for prosperity, not to publish on my Youtube channel (although I do have permission for the clip above), Amaan explained that their biggest investment isn’t just the reinforcement-learning engine that powers message optimization, which was very impressive in its own right. It’s the change management process they built around it. Their strategic consultants work directly with marketing and CRM teams to help them shift from rules-based campaigns to adaptive, agent-driven ones. They even have content design teams who map labels, components, and contexts to retrain creative teams for adaptive workflows.

In other words, they don’t just ship a product, they help rewire the organization.

And that, to me, is the most interesting part. Because it’s not just marketers who need to learn how to work with AI. It’s the entire company.

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Martech TherapyMatthew Niederberger

DOJO AI and the quiet rebellion against complexity

Aampe isn't the only one out there, because that same realization hit me again in a recent conversation with Duarte Garrido and Luke Costley-White from DOJO AI. Duarte, a former marketer at Coca-Cola and Sky, told me:

“Every new tool sucked the team into its own workflows and dashboards. Martech has over-complicated the function for too long.”

DOJO’s goal, and Aampe in their own way, is to reverse that. Their platform gives small and mid-sized teams something most enterprise stacks can’t: freedom from the tools themselves. Their agents connect to analytics, ads, and social data to analyze, recommend, and even execute. But they deliberately keep a human in the loop. Duarte told me, “We’re not building a dystopian auto-marketing system. Agents should advise and act, but marketers still steer.”

That principle, delegation with control, is at the core of what I’ve been exploring in my own writing about AI organization charts in my series on Agentic AI in Marketing. The future marketing team won’t be replaced by AI, but it will be rearranged around it. The best marketers won’t be the ones who prompt best. They’ll be the ones who design and govern intelligent systems.

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Martech TherapyMatthew Niederberger

Creativity as a side effect of delegation

Luke’s story brings that to life. Before joining DOJO, he used the tool as a client. During the demo he told me how he built a complete campaign concept, including insights, SEO analysis, and visuals, the kind of work that might normally take an agency three months and six figures. Sooner after starting to work with the tool, he joined DOJO full-time.

When I asked if marketers are becoming more creative again, Duarte was honest: not yet.

“They’re still getting used to being more strategic first,” he said. “They’re learning to manage AI like a team of specialists. The creativity will come next.”

That’s the wave we’re entering now. Not one of automation, but of reallocation. AI gives time back to the humans in the system. What they do with it will decide whether marketing gets smarter or just faster.

We’re entering the age of what David Raab and others call the ‘Super Agent’, a unified orchestration layer that could soon oversee most marketing actions. It’s a seductive idea for sure. An intelligent system connecting data, content, and channels in real time. But every Super Agent raises a human question. What happens when strategy becomes a dialogue instead of a hierarchy? When the work changes from execution to interpretation?

In that sense, AI doesn’t replace marketers, it demotes them from operators to editors, from rule-setters to reviewers. This should not be misunderstood and seen as a loss of power, but rather a redefinition of it.

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Martech TherapyMatthew Niederberger

The new gravity inside organizations

Lee Hammond’s latest recap post of Treasure Data's CDP World 2025 event, shows how quickly tools are merging, while David Raab’s essay imagines how processes could merge. But neither map shows the hardest merge of all -> people.

AI doesn’t erase silos. It bends them. It pulls IT, data, and marketing into shared orbit, sometimes unwillingly. The friction we feel isn’t simply technical or stratgic, it’s gravitational. It’s what happens when decades of organizational habit collide with a system that learns faster than its managers do. And that is what fascinates me the most. AI solutions will be commoditized quicker than you can roast bread... and butter it. But organizational changes will be the key.

Unlearning as the real skill

Not to sound like a broken record, but I keep coming back to that moment with Aampe. The uncomfortable pause where I realized my brain was wired for campaigns, for the status quo our works seems to be stuck in, not for adaptive systems that we are seeing today. That moment matters more than any feature list or benchmark chart. Because before AI transforms marketing, it has to transform how we think about control, trust, and value.

We talk about AI as if it’s going to fix marketing. I don’t think it will, not entirely, not how it is sold to us. But it might fix how we work, if we’re willing to unlearn what made us efficient, and start learning what makes us adaptive.