This as told essay is based on a conversation with Colin Piper, CMO of BuildOps, an AI platform for commercial contractors. Previously, he spent more than a decade at Autodesk, ultimately leading a large marketing team for the vertical construction industry. The essay has been edited for length and clarity. Autodesk said in a statement that it has modernized and transformed its marketing department over the past four years.
Some people call it “empire building.”
You are familiar with your department and you want to ensure that it grows.
The number of reports you have in your organization is directly linked to your value to the company and certainly to the budget, which is very important for marketing.
I can definitely relate to chasing some of that internal visibility and fame. It’s a trap that many people fall into, and I’d say I did the same at Autodesk. My marketing department alone employed more than 130 people worldwide.
A cumbersome planning meeting of 30 people
There were so many layers of management that I felt like I was just managing people and not really running the business or marketing. I was so far removed from the real daily work.
I remember a time when I was in a room conducting the annual meeting marketing planning session, attended by 30 amazing creative marketers. We try to make decisions, and it’s very inefficient, going around in circles.
That was a big light bulb moment for me: OK, we’ve grown to the point where it’s getting in the way of us actually being an efficient machine.
Our goal to fully execute a complex campaign, from inception to market, was one quarter – or thirteen weeks – but sometimes it took more than twenty weeks. Sometimes, with too much budget and too many resources, you get a little too creative.
Creating ‘program managers’
As the team grew, the need for one grew role of program manager became increasingly clear. It was someone who coordinated the work between product marketing, demand generation, operations and external stakeholders, and who was the intermediary for all these teams.
We had a whole team of program managers under me. The feature was built almost as a symptom of the fact that the team was already too big. A leaner team probably wouldn’t need that feature at all.
Another problem was passion projects. It’s easier for them to hide within a larger organization because there’s a lot more going on and less visibility at each layer. Looking back, there were some great projects that perhaps weren’t fully aligned with North Star’s marketing goals and didn’t impact the revenue numbers you want to achieve as a marketing leader. In a leaner organization with more supervision and a tighter structure, everyone strives for a similar goal.
How AI is changing the marketing organization
Towards the end of my time at Autodesk, the company and marketing department were modernizing rapidly. They were thinking about how they were going to go to market, how they were going to sell, and how they were going to bring AI into a very large company, but they were going to have to do it with an incredible amount of creativity and innovation. I have a lot of respect for what was set in motion when I left. I think they went through it that transformation and do things much more efficiently.
A lot has changed in the last 18 to 24 months with the advent of AI and its impact on the marketing function.
Claude CodeClaude Cowork, and some of these big new things coming to market, have really held a mirror up to marketers. If so much of this can be produced at a very efficient level with smart implementation of AI, you may not need those 130 people anymore. You might need twenty people to do that job.
At BuildOps, where I am now, we have quickly moved to what I like to call enterprise-grade first-party AI.
We have an AI linked to our system so it reads your internal documents, our data warehouse and email. It can be much more effective than just a generic LLM. AI works horizontally across the marketing team and we orchestrate different agents to work together.
Last week we launched a new campaign that went from inception to full launch in less than six weeks. My leadership team of five came up with that idea at our remote site, and the team just went into an AI-heavy execution mode. They built a campaign with a long, complex research tool, developed a bunch of creative, and it’s now out in the market six weeks later. That was quite astonishing.
There is a trend going on right now marketing is shrinking. Companies are saying, “Is this a position that requires so many people to do the work?” Probably not anymore.
I have a very efficient team of twenty marketers. It’s a mini version of how I structured my organization at Autodesk, but with a fraction of the people. I want to make sure that every person we bring in adds a lot of value and has the right scope. I’m not interested in hiring managers for managers’ sake. At a startup we don’t have the luxury of having these types of employees.
My advice for CMOs is not to be afraid to get closer to work. You also don’t have to be a CMO focused only on the vision or only on the brand. You have to worry a lot about the execution, the numbers and the activities of the team. If you have that perspective, in this new AI world you can do much more as one person than before, where you needed multiple layers of teams to do that work on your behalf.
An Autodesk spokesperson said in a statement that the company has modernized its operations and transformed its marketing over the past four years.
“We’ve embraced AI to work faster and get more done, and we’ve put accountability and experimentation at the heart of the way we work,” the spokesperson said. “The result is an effective, modern growth machine that delivers results for our customers and our business.”
