“You’ll be reporting to 10K, our AI VP of Marketing,” claimed Jason M. Lemkin to the SaaStr audience. Did jaws drop? Mine certainly did.

Bot meets boss.

A human reporting to an AI agent sounds like the first act of a bad sci-fi comedy. One where the marketing team starts every Monday by asking, “Does the algorithm seem mad at us?”

I hate this idea. And yet, dismissing it would be a mistake.

To his credit, on his podcast after SaaStr, Lemkin also admitted that 10K is “NOT really a VP of marketing yet.” More like a replacement for marketing analysts, ops coordinators, and junior content marketers. The title may be wrong. The direction is not.

What AI Agents Will Actually Replace

Agents are coming for the busywork.

AI agents will change knowledge work. Radically. Permanently. Probably weirdly. They’ll run reports, clean lists, draft emails, personalize follow-ups, monitor campaigns, update systems, summarize meetings, build landing pages, query databases, and replace a shocking amount of “can someone just take care of this?” work.

Have at it, 10K.

Some of this work should be run by bots: low-risk, internal, repetitive, measurable, operational work that doesn’t require a human to read the room or carry the relationship.

Leadership Still Requires a Human

But marketing leadership is different. Great marketing is not just output, testing subject lines, summarizing calls, or generating 47 LinkedIn post options before breakfast.

Marketing still needs a pulse.

Great marketing is about seeing what others miss and connecting the unconnected. It’s walking a trade show floor, overhearing a throwaway comment, and realizing it’s the missing link in your positioning. It’s sitting in a tense executive meeting and noticing that the real objection isn’t in the words being spoken. It’s knowing when the data is technically right and strategically useless.

Bots hear words. Leaders hear meaning.

Can AI help? Of course. AI can accelerate research, challenge assumptions, pressure-test messaging, find patterns, generate options, and expose blind spots. But it can’t build trust, sense hesitation, or know when the team is complying but not believing.

At least, not where it counts.

Redesign the Team Around Judgment

So the question is not whether AI will redesign your team. It will. The question is whether you will redesign your team first. Let agents own more of the execution layer, and let humans own more of the meaning layer. Less grunt work. More judgment.

Humanity is the strategy.

As teams get smaller and agents become more capable, the human traits that remain will matter even more: empathy, listening well, trust-building, and judgment.

Especially judgment: the ability to connect the unconnected, choose the idea worth owning, and know what not to do, even when the machine can do all of it.

Maybe one day a human will technically “report” to a bot. But the marketing leaders who win the agentic era won’t surrender leadership to machines. They’ll use machines to create more room for actual leadership.

Because the most human leaders will win the agentic era.

Written by Drew Neisser