Your org chart will not show where marketing work waits in 2027
For most of our careers, we have drawn marketing teams around what people make. Content sits here, product marketing there, demand generation and events alongside, with agencies and freelancers filling the gaps. That made sense when making took most of the time.
It takes far less time now. A first draft can arrive in minutes. What has not sped up is everything around it: the brief, the check, the approval and the sign-off. For many teams, that is where the week goes.
Teams are being reshaped around this already. In Forrester's pulse of B2B marketing decision-makers after the second quarter of 2026, 43% said their marketing department had been significantly restructured. But a restructure redraws the boxes, and the decisions often stay where they were.
The unwritten rules are now a problem
Every marketing team runs on rules nobody wrote down. Someone knows which claims legal will accept. Someone else knows which image is the approved one. Writing in MarTech on 14 October 2026, Gareth Chilton described people as "the unofficial integration layer between functions."
That works while people do all the work. It works far less well when AI agents do some of it. As Chilton put it, "Workflow can automate an approval path, but it can't decide who should have approval authority." An agent cannot follow a rule that exists only in a colleague's memory.
So the most useful structural question for 2027 is not "what roles do we need?" It is "who decides what?"
Decision rights are a marketing skill
Decision rights are the agreed answers to three questions for each recurring call: who decides, who checks, and when does it go up a level. They cover the decisions every CIM member will recognise: positioning, product claims, brand voice, channel mix, spend and publishing.
Written down, they do two things. They stop every judgement call queueing at the most senior person. And they give AI agents, new starters and agency partners the same clear rules to work within.
This is a professional skill as much as an operational one. Anthropic's October 2026 report on its own workplace found its hiring managers increasingly emphasise autonomy and judgement, relative to technical domain expertise and implementation. It is one AI company, not a marketing team, but the direction is worth noting. As making gets faster, the value of a marketer's judgement rises.
It also gives time back for thinking. Optimizely's June 2026 study of 2,003 marketing leaders found 39% say they are too busy managing workflows, outputs and day-to-day demands to spend enough time thinking strategically or developing new ideas.
A starting exercise for any team
You do not need a reorganisation to begin. Try this over one quarter:
- List the decisions your team makes every week, not the tasks.
- Name one owner and one checker for each. Everyone else is consulted, not approving.
- Agree the point at which each decision goes up a level, such as a new figure, a customer name or spend above a threshold.
- Write the rules down where people, partners and any agents can all use them.
- Measure how long work waits at each decision for one normal working week, then move routine calls closer to the work.
Start with a single workflow, such as a monthly campaign email, and extend the approach once the queue shortens. The boxes on the chart can stay where they are. What changes is who owns which decisions.
The fuller version, with a decision map for B2B teams and a four-layer team structure for working with agents, is on the Jam 7 blog: Marketing team structure for 2027: who decides, who checks.
About the Author
Jack Hardy is the Chief Marketing Officer at Jam 7, an award-winning Chartered Marketer, and a CIM board member with over a decade of experience in crafting B2B growth strategies across various technology platforms and SaaS providers.