Demandbase: Marketing Team Growth Slowing in AI Era

The responsibilities of the marketing team are growing – but often without the team to support it. 

According to research from Demandbase, B2B marketing teams are facing growing pressure to deliver on tighter deadlines without headcount growth. 

Nearly three quarters of teams (72%) are the same size or smaller than they were two years ago, even as 70% of marketers report facing shorter timelines. 

“Marketing teams are being asked to produce more, faster and with fewer resources,” says Gabe Rogol, CEO of Demandbase. 

“AI has already driven system-level change in areas like engineering, but marketing hasn’t made the same leap due to the complexity involved in bringing products to market. 

“Agentic marketing is the only way to give marketers the capacity they need to move at the speed they’re expected to, by pulling them out of the weeds and freeing them to do more creative and strategic work.”

How is marketing work changing?

According to the research, one of the biggest bottlenecks is how work is moving across teams. 

More than half of marketers (56%) cited processes and cross-functional workflows as their biggest organisational challenges – while 21% said the same thing of the tech stack, data and tools. 

The same research also found that human skills are becoming more valuable as AI takes on more scope within the marketing team. 

Among the marketers surveyed, 56% said that strategy, creativity, judgement, communication and leadership matter more today than they did two years ago. By comparison, only 38% said the same of AI, prompting, tool fluency and data literacy. 

These human skills are of particular importance when it comes to critically managing agentic work, with less than a quarter of respondents saying they rarely or never have to correct AI output. 

In fact, more than half (56%) of marketers say it now takes more creativity to produce work that stands out, while just 16% of respondents believe that creativity matters less because AI handles more execution. 

AI’s impact on search

The same research also found that AI is changing the overall strategies marketing teams are using – particularly when it comes to search. 

Nearly two thirds of respondents (62%) report that they have already changed their search strategy for AI search, while 64% say they have attempted to influence the way AI describes their brand. 

Despite this, only 35% of marketers systemically track the way their brand appears in AI search. 

At the same time, company websites are largely staying strong. According to Demandbase’s research, 44% of respondents said that their site traffic increased over the past year. By comparison, 15% saw a decline, 25% saw flat traffic and 15% could not say. 

This, the research suggests, means that marketers should treat AI search as “another audience in the buying journey” – meaning that teams should prioritise building capabilities to market to the AI systems shaping buyers’ decisions, while still continuing to invest in their own native platforms, where buyers continue to build preference and trust. 

Who are Demandbase’s key partners?

• Salesforce: Demandbase is a launch partner for Salesforce Hunter, bringing in real-time B2B account, engagement, intent and buying-group data.
• Adobe: The partnership between Demandbase and Adobe integrates account-based marketing (ABM) and keyword-level intent data directly into Adobe's enterprise ecosystem.
• HubSpot: The partnership between HubSpot and Demandbase provides a native, two-way integration that unites B2B sales and marketing data for ABM and account-based experience (ABX) strategies.