Introduction

Every CEO or investor I talk to recently about hiring a marketing leader wants someone who “gets AI.” What they actually mean by that is all over the map.

I can’t help but pause for a moment of sympathy. 

The CMO role has navigated a two-decade trial by fire. A cohort of generalist brand leaders faced a quant revolution brought about by the rise of performance marketing, demand gen, and data science. SEO and paid channels surged and then wilted in the face of squeezes in organic traffic and CAC. Social, mobile, and content channels swirled forth from TikTok to influencers to podcasts. B2B boards demanded magic through PLG, ABM, and other strategies to fill predictable revenue pipelines.

Well, give your favorite CMO a hug and tell them to buckle up, because now AI is here.

So what does 'getting AI' actually mean for marketing leadership? I think it breaks down into two distinct but interrelated questions:

• How do you market AI products in an intensely crowded market?
• How do you use AI to transform the marketing function itself?

Today's marketers must excel at both: racing to market AI products alongside product teams building at breakneck speed, while simultaneously reinventing their own GTM playbooks ahead of their competitors. The unprecedented number of startups racing to double-digit millions in ARR and even established companies re-igniting growth have drastically raised the expectations for GTM leaders.

While no one has navigated AI-transformed marketing for more than a few years, it’s worth parsing what’s genuinely new versus what echoes previous disruptions. What types of skills and experiences are most relevant in hiring marketing leaders who can thrive in this AI era?

What follows draws from conversations with founders, investors, CMOs, and our own work at RevelOne with experts in our Interim Expert Network and in implementing AI in our own workflows. 

This artlcle is broken into two parts based on the above questions:

Part 1 - Marketing AI Products

Part 2 - Using AI to Transform Marketing (a separate article)

Hiring a Marketing Leader in the Age of AI - Summary Concepts

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Part 1 - Marketing AI Products

AI’s transformative impact feels unprecedented to many, however, successful marketers have been here before, bringing unfamiliar, breakthrough technologies to market by focusing on buyer needs over technical novelty.

What’s different this time, and what is not? We’ll examine where AI products follow familiar patterns and where they call for new approaches.

Customer Pain Points Are More Important Than AI Buzzwords 

The best marketers in technology have always started with the buyer and their needs. If anything, be wary of an overly AI-pilled leader who would rather talk about RAG, fine-tuning, or the coming AGI singularity than the customer. Like mobile-first or cloud before it, “AI” has a limited shelf life as a differentiator on its own before receding into table stakes for all products.

In a noisy world of exaggerated claims and customer confusion, clarity and sharpness in product marketing around benefits are even more critical. 

What’s new with AI is how its ability to handle unstructured data and non-deterministic processes has opened up use cases that resisted software in the past. This has enabled startups to delve deep into verticals such as law, health, finance, or construction, while others focus on horizontal capabilities like transcription, image generation, training, or lead enrichment.

The choice between hiring a marketer with either vertical or horizontal expertise follows familiar patterns from previous technology waves. For a deep vertical product, you may want someone who knows the buyer cold or has sold to a vertical market with similar characteristics. Horizontal products call for skills in articulating broad use cases delivered in new ways, while prioritizing and scaling targeted messaging to multiple personas and industries.

The Buyer’s Paradox: Explosive Demand Meets Paralyzing Fear

While staying customer-focused is critical, marketers do face some atypical dynamics in buyer adoption of AI products. Unlike previous technology waves, where the primary challenge was creating demand, AI has flipped the script: massive latent demand exists, but it's unfocused and anxious. Marketers must understand how to channel and capture this demand.

The explosion of ChatGPT and AI in public consciousness and business discourse has driven high awareness and interest. A legal tech company shared with me that demand gen is not a priority because they have more inbound from law firms than they can handle. Law firm leaders, hardly known for browsing Techmeme and keeping up with tech trends, were asking their teams what their AI plan was. 

However, the same ubiquity and velocity pre-seeding buyer interest has also spawned buyer paralysis. Each category has more new competitors than in previous cycles. AI-driven coding itself has been an accelerant, enabling more companies to launch more features faster, making consideration and selection harder. 

Finally, the industry’s own hype around rapid change makes it harder for buyers to jump in, as they fear that technologies and companies may shift under their feet by next quarter. B2B buyers face pressure from leaders demanding an AI strategy, and they fear being locked in with the wrong choice. In these early years, they also encounter initial results and third-party studies showing ambiguous results on proven efficiencies and ROI.

Marketers with a sense of early-stage market buyer psychology will do better in this environment. Companies transitioning from individual trial and PLG motions to enterprise will need marketers who know how to communicate around new product adoption and ROI. They’ll need to partner with Product to align messaging with product entry points and value. Experience with the below playbooks is relevant in this space:

GTM Tactics for Unfreezing Buyers:

• PLG motions with narrow, low-risk entry points for trial
• Pricing flexibility: Monthly contracts vs. annual commitments, flexible pricing tiers (freemium trial, usage-based, flat seat-first)
• Risk-reduction messaging
• Pilot programs with clear success metrics
• Integration with existing tool stacks (e.g., major CRMs)
• Partner-led distribution for trust building

Everything has a Little Category Creation Now

The surge of AI innovation has made “Category Creation” at risk of becoming a buzzword like “Growth Hacker” was 10 years ago. However, the impact is real across both new and transformed markets, so it’s worth unpacking what it means and how it applies. Marketers who can shape these definitions skillfully can unfreeze some of the buyer challenges described above. 

A large proportion of AI-driven companies face some degree of category definition challenges. The key distinction lies in whether you're introducing an entirely new class of application that buyers haven't considered before, or reimagining an existing category in a fundamentally new way.

True category creation involves specific market conditions, particularly in B2B environments. They include factors such as: lack of existing budget line items for the solution, limited or inconsistent terminology that reduces proactive search and consideration, unclear competitive sets, and undeveloped evaluation criteria and industry analyst frameworks.

Historical examples illustrate this evolution. In B2B, categories like Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), Headless CMS, and Account-Based Marketing (ABM) each experienced early years of unclear naming and definitions before market consensus emerged. Consumer examples include streaming television services, ride sharing, and Buy Now Pay Later payment services.

The AI wave has produced truly novel technologies (LLMs themselves, coding Agents, AI companions) alongside enhancements to existing categories substantial enough to warrant re-introductions. (Notetaking/transcription, next-generation CRM, enterprise knowledge management, marketing automation).

Hiring managers can first evaluate the need for existing vertical experience. As discussed above, knowing the buyer cold can provide advantages. However, if the founder or others already possess deep market knowledge, and you need the marketing leader to introduce breakthrough approaches, consider someone who has done category creation in a different market. In fact, for markets lacking recent innovation, you might not want someone steeped in that space.

Category creation experiences and skill sets for marketers include:

• Coining category language and terminology
• Building industry narratives through thought leadership 
• Leveraging credible early adopters as proof points
• Defining new success metrics and KPIs
• Creating evaluation frameworks from scratch

These category creation or category re-definition exercises require both close collaboration with a founder to tap into their broader vision as well as staying close to customers to understand their use cases, confusions, and where messaging resonates with them.

From Chaos to Category King: The Breakout Phenomenon

Another distinctive aspect of this AI wave has been the unprecedented velocity and scale of company breakouts. Traditional SaaS benchmarks such as achieving “triple double double” annual growth rates or getting to $10M ARR in three years and $100M in seven to nine years have been shattered by companies like Cursor, Lovable, Midjourney, OpenAI, and Anthropic, which have reached massive scale in compressed timeframes.

While $100M+ outcomes remain exceptional, the broader acceleration is real. More companies are sprinting to $10M and $25M ARR faster than ever before, creating elevated investor and board expectations, particularly for VCs, who seek a potential home run in every investment. This fundamentally changes how marketers must think about growth trajectories and positioning.

Marketers can’t generate lightning in a bottle by themselves, the catalyst is product pull and the resulting organic snowball effect. However, they must understand these dynamics and be ready to amplify and ride these waves.

Building on the tactics above to overcome buyer hesitation, the ultimate prize is grabbing the title of category leader and the inevitability narrative that follows it. The category leader can quickly become the default on everyone’s consideration list and the safe choice in an uncertain market.

A few companies have caught this kind of lightning in a bottle. “Vibecoding,” a term for apps that allow non-developers to build software, is an explosive trend with a catchy name, and Replit and Lovable have ridden the wave to leadership. Conversely, Agents are everywhere as an idea, but the category is still forming, and a scrum of companies are still battling it out with a messy mix of definitions and features. 

While hard to plan for, marketers need to think about the tactics and dynamics that support these breakouts:

• Jumping on trends and real-time narrative shifts 
• CEO/founder amplification, establishment as category spokesperson
• Strategic aggressiveness on bold claims and even controversy
• Accelerated community building 
• Partnerships to establish credibility

In this world, marketers with skills around brand and narrative can help ride these waves. Experiences with fast-moving social narratives, content marketing, PR, and even media might be compelling in a world with daily swirls of funding announcements, competitive products, government regulation, and international headlines.

The New Product Velocity Breaks the Old Marketing Cycle

Speed permeates every aspect of the dynamics discussed above. AI has accelerated product development, investors have heightened growth expectations, and marketing organizations must fundamentally redesign their processes to match this new pace.

Software development has been AI's most immediate and transformative application. Tools like Cursor, Windsurf, and Claude Code have dramatically accelerated dev teams, enabling more competitors to ship more features more often. HubSpot’s CEO Yamini Rangan lamented that their product marketers can’t communicate and roll out new features as fast as their developers can build them. Marketing processes, not product capabilities, can become the bottleneck.

So, marketers will need to adapt to a new cadence internally of product development and a new competitive metabolism of change in the market. Marketers who rely on existing playbooks around quarterly release cycles and long documentation checklists will fall behind and lose credibility with their leadership and product partners.

Marketers will need to develop leaner processes and adopt a more “run-and-gun” attitude, staying close to founders, customers, and trends to adapt messaging and marketing. Marketers must balance maintaining the through-line of broader brand narratives while being highly flexible in GTM components and execution. Changelogs and release notes become integral to content strategy, while velocity and innovation themselves are a driver of credibility and leadership in the market.

Fortunately, new AI-driven applications exist to accelerate GTM tasks like market research, content, and campaign management, so marketers have some new tools of their own. This involves new opportunities and challenges, leading us into Part 2 on how marketers will manage transformed GTM organizations.

For Part 2 of this article on Using AI to transform Marketing, the function, click here.

About RevelOne

RevelOne is a specialized go-to-market search & advisory partner that drives Growth through People. Growth strategy and talent strategy are completely intertwined, yet often handled by different people. We staff projects with expertise across both to support our clients in sharpening their growth plans and ensuring they have the right full-time and part-time talent to achieve their specific goals.  

Over the past 10 years, we’ve successfully placed 1,700 people at over 750 clients, including both tech companies and traditional companies looking for modern GTM leaders. Over 50 of these clients are now unicorns.

Our GTM retained search practice focuses on Marketing, Sales, Client Success, and Partnerships/BD permanent hires for all levels, from executives to directors, managers, and team buildouts. We can also source temporary hires – pre-vetted GTM experts – for strategy and execution on interim, part-time, or project-based engagements.

Contact: Have a GTM question, a new hire, or a problem you’d like to solve? Reach out to RevelOne today to discuss: dweiner@revel-one.com