Tomorrow’s Marketing Operating Model: Your Path to Prepare 

Marketing leaders today face a dual challenge: delivering immediate results to satisfy the business while building for an AI-powered future. 

This pressure is intense and at times feels impossible. CEOs and CFOs care about revenue impact, demanding proof of ROI at increasingly granular levels. At the same time, CMOs and CTOs are tasked with deploying next-generation capabilities like agentic marketing (autonomous, AI-driven marketing operations) to stay ahead. 

The question many organisations are grappling with is simple: 

How do you innovate with AI and new operating models without disrupting the day-to-day business? 

In our experience, this is where many transformation efforts stall. Not because the ambition isn’t there, but because the risk of getting it wrong feels too high. 

The high-pressure reality for modern marketers 

Today, the CMO function is being pulled in two directions. On one side, short-term performance dominates. (“How much revenue did this campaign drive this quarter?”) 

On the other hand, there’s a clear imperative to reinvent for the future: embedding AI, enabling new ways of working, and building a more adaptive marketing model. 

Given today’s economic climate and increased boardroom scrutiny, marketing investment must be justified with precision. It’s no longer enough to talk about customer experience in isolation; marketing leaders are expected to demonstrate clear financial contribution to growth. 

At the same time, technology is evolving rapidly. Decisions made today around data platforms, AI and architecture must support capabilities that are still emerging. Planning even two to three years ahead can feel uncertain. 

Perhaps the toughest challenge of all is this: you cannot pause your current marketing operations to transform them. 

Quarterly targets don’t wait. Customer expectations don’t stand still. And yet, organisations still need space to experiment, test and evolve. 

Why Organisations Get Stuck

In the age of agentic marketing, several longstanding challenges are becoming more acute: 

1. Disconnected Data 

Many organisations have made significant progress in collecting and storing data. What they still lack is the ability to effectively activate data into customer service, marketing and sales. Without an ability to adapt to customer signals at the moment where it matters, all this data collection is not delivering any benefit. Data remains underutilised, limiting both personalisation and AI-driven decisioning. 

2. Building the Business Case for Transformation 

CEOs and CFOs demand clear evidence that marketing innovation will drive measurable growth. At the same time, CMOs and CTOs bring different priorities: customer experience, technical feasibility, and risk. Building a business case that satisfies all stakeholders is increasingly complex to navigate successfully and typically results in huge compromises that hinder your ability to accelerate. 

3. Balancing Innovation with Business-as-usual 

Innovation cannot come at the expense of performance. Organisations are cautious about introducing new operating models or technologies that might disrupt existing campaigns or customer experiences. The challenge is to modernise incrementally, without losing control. 

4. Skills and Capability Gaps in Today’s World 

Agentic marketing introduces new requirements across data science, AI, journey orchestration and agile operations. These capabilities are in short supply, and developing them while maintaining current output is a significant hurdle. 

These challenges are not new, but they are more visible, and more pressing, than ever. And even more so in today’s world, where there are pressures on CMOs and CTOs to in-house these key capabilities. 

A Practical Way Forward: Building in Parallel 

So how to move forward? One of the most effective ways we’re seeing organisations address this challenge is not by replacing their current model and just navigate these key challenges, but by building a new operating model alongside your existing operations. 

Rather than attempting a full transformation in one step, they create a future-ready marketing operating model in parallel to existing operations. 

This allows organisations to: 

• Experiment with AI-driven, agentic marketing approaches in a controlled environment 
• Design your customer data architecture from scratch, without the need to use existing infrastructure that is no longer up to date 
• Ability to design around the experience you are aiming to deliver  
• Being able to measurable impact and proof the value from day 1 

In Effect, it Creates a Real-World Environment Where New Capabilities Can be Proven Before Being Scaled.

Introducing a unified, future-ready marketing operating model 

To support this approach, we’ve initiated a unified marketing operating model, designed to bring together the technology, data and services required to run this parallel environment effectively. 

The model is built on Salesforce’s latest technology, including Agentforce Marketing and Data 360, combined with dentsu’s Generative Audiences capabilities for identity resolution and data enrichment. 

Together, This Enables: 

• A modern CRM architecture that can adapt to customer signals  
• AI-driven orchestration of workflows  
• Building around the possibilities of the new paradigm of AI – instead of trying to stick a bit of AI on your existing process 
• Finally closing the loop between paid media, CRM and Customer Experience 

Importantly, this isn’t just about deploying technology. It also introduces new workflows and operating processes (otherwise known as agentic workflows) where AI supports planning, execution and optimisation, alongside human oversight. 

Delivered as a turnkey concept, this model can be stood up in a condensed timeframe, allowing organisations to begin testing and learning quickly – without interrupting existing operations. 

Driving the Next Level of Marketing Outcomes:

Operating within a unified model, with built-in governance and orchestration, gives marketing leaders greater control and visibility across the entire customer experience – from acquisition through to loyalty. 

AI does not replace the role of marketing teams. Instead, it complements teams, and yes it will change the roles of Marketeers but typically allows you to focus on higher-value activities. 

Routine decisions, such as audience selection, budget allocation and optimisation, can be supported by intelligent systems. This allows teams to spend more time on strategy, creativity and interpretation. 

The result is a more efficient, more responsive, and ultimately more accountable marketing function. 

Preparing Today for Tomorrow’s Marketing 

The shift toward AI-powered, agentic marketing is already underway. The question is not whether it will happen, but how organisations choose to approach it. 

Those that succeed will be the ones that can experiment, learn and adapt, while continuing to deliver in the present. 

The opportunity is to create a window into the future of marketing, without stepping away from today’s performance. 

If you’re ready to explore what a future-ready marketing operating model could look like for your organisation, we can help you define and stand up a parallel model, designed to prove value quickly and scale with confidence. 

Get in touch to discuss how to activate this approach within your business.