For VP Product Marketing at B2B software companies. One page showing where your team uses AI today, one showing where it should be in six months. The gap between them is your work backlog.
Operating Model — example
Before → After| Process | Today | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Launch narrative | Human | AI-assisted |
| Campaign brief | Human | AI-assisted |
| Monthly reporting | Human | Automated |
| Content calendar | Human | Automated |
| Onboarding emails | Human | Agentic |
The problem it solves
Most marketing teams have no shared picture of how they're using AI. Prompts sit in personal notes. Tools get picked individually. Some workflows are fully AI-driven, others are still pure human, and the majority fall somewhere in between. Nobody's keeping track.
That's Shadow AI dressed up in a spreadsheet.
What it costs you
Duplicated work across the team. Inconsistent quality reaching your buyers. Budget going to tools nobody agreed to use.
The Marketing AI Operating Model fixes this with two views. One shows the actual current state. The other shows the target state six months out. The gap between them becomes your work backlog.
The framework
Every marketing process step gets handled in one of four ways. Name which one, and you can decide whether it belongs there or needs to move.
People do the work. AI plays no part.
Judgement calls, relationships, creative direction, senior positioning conversations.
A person uses AI as part of the task. They own the output.
Faster drafting, sharper rewrites, broader research, first-pass analysis.
A deterministic system runs it. No AI. Same input, same output, every time.
Reporting, distribution, scoring, alerts.
An AI system runs the task end-to-end inside defined guardrails. It makes decisions within rules, across multiple steps.
Segmented onboarding at scale, personalised competitor briefs, tiered lead qualification. Still rare.
Where the model lives
Whatever shape your marketing org takes, it's doing some version of these five things. That's why the same model works whether you've got a team of five or fifty.
Campaign planning, paid channels, lead flow, event marketing.
Launch narrative, positioning, competitive intelligence, sales enablement.
Asset production, editorial calendar, distribution.
Reporting, systems, data hygiene, attribution.
Expansion, education, advocacy, community.
Made real
Fictional company. Real shape. Meridian is a B2B SaaS analytics platform, £45M revenue, 12-person marketing team. Here's what their Operating Model could look like six months into structured AI adoption.
Company
B2B SaaS analytics platform
Revenue
£45M
Marketing team
12 people
Six months ago
Shadow AI. Prompts in personal notes. Two power users, ten sceptics.
Today
Shipped Operating Model. Three systems in production. Quarterly review.
| Process | 6 months ago | Today | Target |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product Marketing | |||
| Launch narrative | Human | AI-assisted | AI-assisted |
| Competitor tracking | Human | Human | AI-assisted |
| Sales enablement content | Human | AI-assisted | Agentic |
| Content | |||
| First-draft article | Human | AI-assisted | AI-assisted |
| Editorial calendar | Human | Automated | Automated |
| Repurposing across channels | Human | Human | Agentic |
| Marketing Ops | |||
| Monthly reporting | Human | Automated | Automated |
| Attribution | Human | Automated | Automated |
| Demand Gen | |||
| Campaign brief | Human | AI-assisted | AI-assisted |
| Ad variants | AI-assisted | AI-assisted | Agentic |
| Customer Marketing | |||
| Onboarding by segment | Human | Human | Agentic |
| Weekly community digest | Human | AI-assisted | AI-assisted |
In your team
I run this same Operating Model for my own agency, updated monthly. Failure modes show up in my map before they reach yours.
The Operating Model is the artifact you leave the Strategy phase with. The book, Prompt. Refine. Deliver. Repeat., covers the full method. This page covers the map.
Thirty minutes. We look at where your team is, talk through what an Operating Model would actually show, and figure out whether working together makes sense.
Book a discovery call