Technology Rewired: Marketing and Growth

How has the marketing and growth team changed across five eras?

1. Era 1 · On-prem

   Before 2005

   0.2

   Marketing teams ran campaigns through agencies, print, events, and mail merge. Email lists lived in desktop databases, and the web team was one person updating the site. Measurement was mostly guesswork.

2. Era 2 · SaaS and cloud

   2005 to 2020

   1.0

   SaaS email, marketing automation, analytics, and SEO tools created specialist roles: demand gen, marketing ops, SEO, content, and lifecycle managers. Teams grew wide, with a tool and an owner for each channel, and keyword rankings became the scoreboard.

3. Era 3 · AI-assisted

   2020 to 2024

   1.8

   Generative AI drafted copy, images, subject lines, and briefs. Output went up sharply, and so did the volume of thin content. Marketers still planned, edited, and approved every asset.

4. Era 4 · Agentic

   2024 onward

   2.5

   Agents now write, test, and publish content, build segments, and run per-user onboarding journeys with human review at the brand level. The bigger change is discovery: buyers ask AI assistants, so visibility in AI answers matters as much as rankings. I explain the workflow difference in GEO vs SEO, and I run GrackerAI, a GEO platform, so I watch this daily.

   The team shape is changing too, the argument in why AI agents are killing traditional marketing teams: smaller growth teams that own outcomes, not channels.

5. Era 5 · Next 5 years

   2026 to 2031

   3.6

   My bet: most production work (drafts, variants, segmentation, reporting) runs through agents, and marketing teams are a few strategists, an editor with real expertise, and an operator who designs agent workflows. Original data, expert voice, and brand become the scarce inputs, because agents can produce everything else.

Which marketing and growth software is being rewired?

• Customer Onboarding Email

  Customer onboarding email moved from mail merge letters to SaaS drip calendars, then to behavior-triggered journeys. Since 2024, AI agents from Customer.io, Braze, HubSpot, Klaviyo and Salesforce draft copy, build segments and assemble journeys from a prompt. Humans still approve launches; the new constraints are clean product event data and inbox sender rules.

Coming next

• SEO to GEO and contentwave 3
• Email marketing
• Marketing automation
• Content creation
• Social media management
• Ads and paid media
• Landing pages
• Webinars and events
• Attribution and analytics
• Influencer and affiliate
• PR and media monitoring