Great piece — this articulated something I’ve been feeling across the work but hadn’t seen framed this cleanly.
I’m seeing the same expansion you describe from the marketing side of the enterprise stack. I work in AI infrastructure helping teams apply AI across their marketing and GTM systems, and the pace of change has forced me to stay aggressively platform-agnostic. Tools come and go. What sticks is whether a company is becoming AI-native in how it thinks, builds, and communicates.
Where this really resonates is your point that digital workforces are a consumption layer, not a replacement layer. In marketing, every “automated” workflow actually increases demand downstream: more data ingestion, more API calls, more orchestration, more judgment at the edges. The teams that struggle are the ones treating AI as a feature bolt-on. The teams that win are redesigning the stack so AI is embedded in both the product and the messaging layer that sits on top of it.
One counter-insight from the field: companies that talk about being AI-powered before they’ve re-architected internally tend to stall. The most durable players I’m seeing rebuild the stack first, then let the positioning emerge naturally from real capability.
Curious how you’re thinking about this showing up in GTM and customer-facing systems specifically — do you see marketing stacks becoming their own kind of digital workforce, or just the proving ground for the broader shift?
Thanks Jen. You're touching on something important with the consumption layer point in marketing specifically.
The pattern we see across wealth management is identical. Every process we delegate to the digital workforce for a partner firm doesn't reduce their software footprint. On average, it increases it. More API calls to their CRM. More data written to their portfolio systems. More compliance checks against their custodian platforms. The digital workforce becomes the heaviest user of their existing stack. This is not always the case, sometimes there is license consolidation that occurs, but the trend is overall in the direction of more consumption.
On your GTM question: marketing stacks are already becoming digital workforces in practice. When your content pipeline, lead scoring, and campaign orchestration are all running through AI, you don't have a "marketing stack with AI features." You have a digital workforce that happens to do marketing. The distinction matters because it changes what you optimize for. Not tool selection. Capability exposure and network depth.
That distinction is exactly what I’m seeing play out in practice. Once content, scoring, orchestration, and experimentation are all agent-driven, “marketing” stops being a function and starts behaving like infrastructure — something you design for throughput, failure modes, and leverage, not campaigns.
Optimizing for capability exposure and network depth over tools also explains why so many stacks feel brittle right now: they were never built to be operated by software. Appreciate you pushing this framing forward — it’s clarifying a lot of confusion in the market.
Great piece — this articulated something I’ve been feeling across the work but hadn’t seen framed this cleanly.
I’m seeing the same expansion you describe from the marketing side of the enterprise stack. I work in AI infrastructure helping teams apply AI across their marketing and GTM systems, and the pace of change has forced me to stay aggressively platform-agnostic. Tools come and go. What sticks is whether a company is becoming AI-native in how it thinks, builds, and communicates.
Where this really resonates is your point that digital workforces are a consumption layer, not a replacement layer. In marketing, every “automated” workflow actually increases demand downstream: more data ingestion, more API calls, more orchestration, more judgment at the edges. The teams that struggle are the ones treating AI as a feature bolt-on. The teams that win are redesigning the stack so AI is embedded in both the product and the messaging layer that sits on top of it.
One counter-insight from the field: companies that talk about being AI-powered before they’ve re-architected internally tend to stall. The most durable players I’m seeing rebuild the stack first, then let the positioning emerge naturally from real capability.
Curious how you’re thinking about this showing up in GTM and customer-facing systems specifically — do you see marketing stacks becoming their own kind of digital workforce, or just the proving ground for the broader shift?
Thanks Jen. You're touching on something important with the consumption layer point in marketing specifically.
The pattern we see across wealth management is identical. Every process we delegate to the digital workforce for a partner firm doesn't reduce their software footprint. On average, it increases it. More API calls to their CRM. More data written to their portfolio systems. More compliance checks against their custodian platforms. The digital workforce becomes the heaviest user of their existing stack. This is not always the case, sometimes there is license consolidation that occurs, but the trend is overall in the direction of more consumption.
On your GTM question: marketing stacks are already becoming digital workforces in practice. When your content pipeline, lead scoring, and campaign orchestration are all running through AI, you don't have a "marketing stack with AI features." You have a digital workforce that happens to do marketing. The distinction matters because it changes what you optimize for. Not tool selection. Capability exposure and network depth.
That distinction is exactly what I’m seeing play out in practice. Once content, scoring, orchestration, and experimentation are all agent-driven, “marketing” stops being a function and starts behaving like infrastructure — something you design for throughput, failure modes, and leverage, not campaigns.
Optimizing for capability exposure and network depth over tools also explains why so many stacks feel brittle right now: they were never built to be operated by software. Appreciate you pushing this framing forward — it’s clarifying a lot of confusion in the market.