Companies have long shaped their B2B marketing organizations around a core assumption: Product development would always be the time-intensive part of the business, with development timelines expected to stretch over months or even years.

Since marketers couldn’t create a campaign for software that didn’t yet exist, organizations built their plans around the product calendar. CMOs sequenced their decisions based on launches, giving marketing teams time to staff up appropriately, negotiate agency contracts, and move campaigns through layers of creative, executive, and legal approvals. Sales and marketing had time to fully prep for each major launch.

The bottleneck has moved from developing the product to bringing it to market, and the organizational structures built around the old constraint are now a liability. Most companies haven’t reoriented their organizations for this new reality, and I predict this mismatch will become one of the defining management problems of 2027.

AI is enabling engineers to prototype, test, and ship software faster. A McKinsey analysis of almost 300 publicly traded companies using AI to drive software development found that the top performers are seeing improvements of 16% to 30% in time to market, productivity, and customer experience, along with software quality gains of 31% to 45%.

Marketing teams have also adopted AI, of course. Almost 60% of marketers say they use AI multiple times a week, another McKinsey study found. However, less than 10% say they’ve started capturing value across workflows—and only 28% say their companies are significantly revamping their marketing teams and workflows around AI.

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