Your Next Marketing Hire Doesn't Exist Yet

Welcome to this week’s edition of Cyber Motion, tailored for cybersecurity business leaders. In this newsletter, you’ll find practical strategies, cutting-edge insights, and fresh thinking designed to help your security-focused brand break through a crowded market. My goal is to equip you with the tools and ideas needed to thrive amid shifting threats, buyer skepticism, and evolving industry standards.

– Tobias

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McKinsey published a finding earlier this year that deserves attention. Seventy-five percent of current roles need fundamental reshaping right now. Not in five years. Not after AGI arrives. Right now.

The quote, from McKinsey partner Alexis Krivkovich. "Just about everybody in the workforce is going to need a new job description in the next two to three years. Most roles won't go away, but they'll be reshaped. Seventy-five percent of roles need fundamental reshaping right now. That includes people leading teams and those who report to them."

That's a macro stat. Here's where it gets specific.

In lean cybersecurity marketing departments (the 2-to-5-person teams running GTM for companies between $10M and $100M ARR), the reshaping is already underway. The marketer you hired 18 months ago is doing a fundamentally different job today. Their title hasn't changed. Their compensation hasn't changed. But the work has.

AI didn't replace anyone on the team. It rewrote what everyone on the team actually does.

The conventional narrative frames this as a binary. AI replaces jobs, or AI augments jobs. Both miss what's happening on the ground.

Content Marketing Institute published research this week showing that 76% of marketers say they're doing the work of more than one person, while only 11% of organizations have actually replaced a worker with AI. The work didn't disappear when someone left. AI was supposed to cover it. Instead, the remaining team absorbed the work and occasionally used AI to move faster through the typing-intensive parts.

Spencer Stuart's December 2025 survey found that 90% of marketing leaders anticipate significant workforce changes. More than a third plan to cut jobs in the next two years. But only 17% have actually made cuts so far. The gap between intention and action suggests the reshaping is happening through drift, not design.

In practice, here's what that looks like in a lean cybersecurity marketing team.

Your content marketer now manages AI-generated first drafts, edits for technical accuracy, runs the distribution workflow, and monitors performance analytics that used to live with a separate ops person. That role used to be "content marketing manager." The actual job is closer to "content operations lead with editorial judgment and AI workflow fluency."

Your demand gen person now builds campaign logic that includes AI-driven segmentation, manages personalization at a scale the team never attempted before, and troubleshoots agent-based workflows when they break. The title still says "demand generation." The job requires systems thinking.

The role expansion has a second-order effect. Specialists are now operating as generalists, overseeing and approving AI-generated output in areas where they don't always know what good looks like. Your SEO lead is reviewing AI-written technical content about zero trust. Your product marketer is approving design assets produced by tools they didn't choose. The quality bar becomes harder to hold when the person holding it was hired for a different skill set.

Nobody posted these roles. Nobody wrote these job descriptions. The work just changed shape, and the people doing it adapted or fell behind.

The pain lives in the gap between what stakeholders expect and how quickly the organization can adapt.

Boards see the McKinsey stats and expect leaner, faster teams. Founders hear "AI-enabled efficiency" and assume the marketing team can absorb another function. Meanwhile, the people doing the work are carrying 150% of their original scope without a revised title, updated compensation, or clear development path for the new skills they're building on the fly.

Capgemini's research puts a number on the disconnect. Seventy percent of marketing leaders agree agentic AI will be transformative, but only 7% strongly agree it has actually boosted marketing effectiveness so far. The narrative is outpacing the reality. Lean teams bear the cost of that gap disproportionately, because they don't have the organizational slack to absorb the friction.

Gartner predicts that over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027 due to escalating costs, unclear value, or inadequate risk controls. For a 3-person marketing team that restructured around an AI-first workflow, a failed implementation becomes an existential problem, not a budget line.

The companies that will navigate this well are the ones that reshape deliberately. That means rewriting actual job descriptions to reflect the work people are already doing. It means acknowledging that "AI fluency" is now a core marketing competency, not a nice-to-have. And it means being honest about what AI can and can't absorb before using it as a reason to not backfill a role.

Three things worth doing this week:

Stay sharp,
Tobias

Run a role-reality audit with your marketing team.

Set a 45-minute working session with every person on your marketing team. Ask each one to answer two questions in writing before the meeting:

Compare the answers. The gap between those two documents is where the reshaping has already happened. Use that gap to rewrite the descriptions, realign expectations, and identify where AI is genuinely reducing load versus where it's just changing the shape of the load.

The goal: by the end of the session, every person on the team should have a job description that reflects the work they're actually doing in April 2026, not the role they were hired into.