In 2025, The Pedowitz Group published a report called The Big Squeeze. Marketers across B2B companies were telling us the same thing: budgets are shrinking, headcount is down, and the mandate is to do more with less.
Fast forward to 2026 — and nothing has changed. Except it has gotten worse.
The difference now is AI. And while AI has genuinely helped marketing teams become more productive, it has also accelerated something dangerous: the complete collapse of marketing strategy into a single-minded pursuit of efficiency.
On a recent episode of Revenue Marketing Raw, Jeff Pedowitz and Dr. Debbie Qaqish went deep on this issue. What follows is a structured breakdown of their conversation — and what it means for your organization.
There is a critical distinction that most marketing leaders are missing right now. Efficiency means doing the same things faster and cheaper. Strategy means making deliberate choices about where to play and how to win.
Right now, the majority of marketing teams are doing the former and calling it the latter.
Here is what efficiency-mode marketing actually looks like:
None of that is strategy. That is constraint-driven marketing — and it is capping growth rather than creating it.
Key insight: Efficiency extracts more from what already exists. Growth requires new markets, new segments, new messages, and new motions. You cannot optimize your way to a new revenue stream.
AI was supposed to free up marketers to think bigger. In many cases, it has done the opposite.
When AI becomes the hammer, every problem looks like an efficiency nail. Marketing teams are deploying AI to produce more content faster, run campaigns at scale, and automate reporting. But very few are using AI to find new markets, model new buyer journeys, improve customer understanding, or build growth strategies.
The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Marketing becomes more efficient at executing existing motion — and that motion produces diminishing returns because nobody is asking whether it is the right motion in the first place.
As Debbie put it during the episode: AI right now is helping marketing become so efficiency-focused that organizations have lost any notion of strategy or growth. And it is killing marketing organizations.
Here is how the cycle plays out:
Companies are already letting CMO positions go without replacing them. Not because marketing does not matter — but because the CMO has stopped functioning as a strategic executive and become a pure execution manager. When that happens, the role is expendable.
Being a CMO in 2026 is genuinely hard. The expectations are unrealistic, the constraints are real, and the pressure is constant. But constraints do not eliminate the obligation to lead strategically.
Here are five things every CMO should be doing differently right now:
Audit how your team spends its time and budget. If 80% is running existing programs faster and cheaper, you do not have a strategy — you have a maintenance plan. A strategy means making active choices about where to invest, where to pull back, and what new markets or motions to pursue.
When cuts come, innovation is the first thing to go. Flip that instinct. Carve out a non-negotiable percentage of budget — even 5 to 10% — for testing new channels, new segments, and new messages. Schedule dedicated time for creative thinking. Mandate hackathons. If you do not plan for innovation, it will not happen.
Dashboards tell you what already happened. Buyers tell you what is changing. Get back in the field — win/loss interviews, customer advisory boards, sales ride-alongs, direct conversations. AI cannot replicate human context, emotion, or intuition. If you want to understand what your customers are feeling, there is no efficient shortcut.
Most RevOps teams are built to track and report on pipeline. That is necessary but insufficient. RevOps should be surfacing growth signals, connecting dots across the full buyer journey, and enabling strategic decisions — not just measuring what already happened. If RevOps is only keeping score, you are reinforcing the efficiency trap.
Most CMOs are playing defense — justifying spend, explaining attribution, defending headcount. Flip the dynamic. Bring the CFO a growth model that shows what efficiency-only marketing delivers versus what a balanced efficiency, strategy, and growth approach unlocks. Make the cost of under-investing in strategy visible and quantifiable. If you do not frame that story, the CFO will frame it for you — and their default is always more cuts.
A useful frame for thinking about this: marketing operates in three modes, and most organizations are severely out of balance.
Efficiency mode: Optimize what already exists. Run programs well. Reduce cost per lead. Automate execution. Risk: growth stalls.
Strategy mode: Decide where to play and how to win. Evolve the ICP. Expand into new markets. Redesign the GTM model. Risk: analysis paralysis.
Growth mode: Create what is next. New segments. New offers. New buying journeys. Risk: chaos without discipline.
Most marketing teams today are operating at roughly 80% efficiency, 15% execution, and 5% strategy. A healthy revenue marketing organization balances all three.
The following questions reflect what marketing leaders are actively asking about this topic.
Marketing efficiency is about doing existing things faster, cheaper, and with fewer resources. Marketing strategy is about making deliberate choices: which markets to enter, which customer segments to prioritize, which messages will differentiate you, and which growth models to build. Efficiency optimizes what exists. Strategy determines what should exist. Most organizations are confusing the two.
Three structural forces are driving this. First, persistent budget pressure has made cost reduction the dominant mandate. Second, the shift toward revenue accountability — while positive — has created an obsessive short-term focus that crowds out longer-horizon strategic investments. Third, AI has made efficiency plays easier to execute, which reinforces the efficiency mindset even further. The result is that strategy, innovation, and customer understanding are quietly being deprioritized across the industry.
AI is not inherently hurting strategy — but it is being misused in ways that suppress it. When AI is deployed exclusively for speed and cost reduction, it scales whatever motion already exists, good or bad. The organizations winning with AI are using it to surface new customer insights, model new market opportunities, and accelerate strategic decisions — not just to produce more content faster. The tool is not the problem. The mindset is.
The cycle starts when marketing is positioned as a cost center. Budget cuts drive an efficiency mandate. AI accelerates execution without improving thinking. Short-term revenue pressure eliminates space for long-term planning. Marketing stops innovating, stops building brand, and stops developing deep customer understanding. Results plateau. Leadership reduces marketing's strategic role further. The CMO position eventually gets eliminated. Companies are already seeing this play out in 2025 and 2026.
Five things matter most. Stop calling optimization a strategy and audit how your team actually spends its time. Protect an innovation budget the way you protect headcount. Get back in front of customers directly, not just through dashboards and data. Reposition RevOps as a strategic function rather than a reporting function. And bring the CFO a growth model that quantifies the cost of under-investing in strategy — before they define your role for you.
Come with a model, not a defense. Show what efficiency-only marketing produces in terms of growth trajectory. Then show what a balanced investment — efficiency plus strategy plus innovation — produces. Make the cost of short-term thinking visible and financially tangible. CFOs respond to numbers. If you can demonstrate that over-indexing on efficiency is limiting growth potential, you shift the conversation from cost cutting to investment decision making.
The CMO should be the chief growth architect and chief customer advocate in the organization. Not the head of demand generation, not the VP of digital, not the efficiency manager. When the CMO is operating at the right level, they are surfacing market intelligence, shaping company strategy, building new revenue models, and advocating relentlessly for the customer. When the CMO is trapped in operational execution, the organization has a problem — and eventually, they replace the role with someone cheaper who can run the programs.
As a rule of thumb, a CMO should be dedicating roughly 50% of their time to direct customer engagement. That means win/loss interviews, customer advisory boards, sales ride-alongs, and conversations with buyers at every stage of the funnel. Dashboards are rearview mirrors. Customers are telling you what is changing right now. No amount of AI or analytics can replicate the strategic value of that direct insight.
Absolutely — but it requires intentionality. Using AI strategically means deploying it to find new markets, model buyer behavior, improve customer segmentation, generate competitive intelligence, and accelerate strategic planning. It does not mean using AI to produce more of the same content faster. If you are using AI exclusively for execution, you are leaving its most valuable capabilities on the table. Strategy requires human judgment, context, and creative thinking — AI should be augmenting that, not replacing it.
When the CMO position is eliminated and not replaced, it is almost always a signal that leadership views marketing as a pure execution function rather than a strategic driver. The short-term cost savings are real. The long-term consequences are severe: weakened brand, reduced customer insight, slower growth, and an organization that is increasingly reactive rather than market-leading. Companies that cut the CMO and replace the function with a director-level operator are making a bet that efficiency alone can sustain growth. The evidence suggests that bet does not pay off.
Efficiency keeps you alive. Strategy is what helps you grow.
Right now, most B2B marketing organizations are surviving — but they are not building. They are executing faster against a plan that is not evolving. And as market conditions shift, buyer behavior changes, and competitive dynamics intensify, that gap between what they are doing and what they should be doing will become impossible to close.
The CMO who breaks out of this trap is the one who leads — not just manages. Who owns the customer. Who makes the growth conversation happen before someone else makes it for them.
That is the standard. And it is absolutely achievable.
Watch Revenue Marketing Raw:
www.pedowitzgroup.com/revenue-marketing-raw