One of our more interesting placements this month wasn’t a channel specialist.
It was a Brand Ops hire, placed into a US-based team, brought on because the client had no internal capacity to manage their own ATS and needed someone who understood a highly specific industry from day one.
The brief sat at the intersection of business transformation and marketing, and it’s the kind of cross-functional ask I’m seeing more of.
AI was supposed to shrink the labour line. It didn’t.
Here’s what surprised me most this year: AI was supposed to make marketing teams cheaper to run. Instead, it’s raising the value of the people who can direct it.
Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey backs this up: labour’s share of the total marketing budget rose from 21.9 per cent to 24.5 per cent this year, even as CMOs push more spend toward channels that are easier to automate with AI.
The cuts aren’t spread evenly. Execution-heavy roles, the ones AI now handles reasonably well on its own, are the ones agencies and internal teams are pulling back on. Senior strategic and commercial roles are the ones growing.
What this means for the brief you’re about to write
The Brand Ops hire is a good example of how that pressure plays out in practice.
The client didn’t need someone to run campaigns. They needed someone who could operate inside a specific industry’s logic, manage an ATS with no internal support, and connect marketing decisions to a broader business transformation effort.
That’s a commercial operator brief, not a channel specialist brief, and it’s increasingly what clients ask for, even when the job title is narrower.
Three things to act on before your next marketing hire
First, check whether your brief is describing a channel specialist or a commercial operator. If the role needs to justify itself to a CFO or sit across functions, you’re more likely to need the latter, and the brief should say so explicitly.
Second, expect execution-heavy roles to attract a wider, more AI-literate pool than before, and expect senior strategic roles to take longer to fill because the pool is thinner.
Third, if the role crosses into operations, data or transformation work, as more marketing briefs now do, say so upfront rather than letting candidates discover the scope in interview.
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