• by Sarah Engel , Op-Ed Contributor, September 28, 2026

Ask 10 marketing leaders about their AI strategy, and you'll probably get 10 answers about tools: platforms they're using, models they like, or vendors they’re investing in this quarter. Very few will mention organizational structure. That's the miss.

New formats are showing up inside every platform, and marketers are expected to evaluate more tools, increase production, and make faster decisions than ever. Left unmanaged, that pressure fragments decision-making, leading to individual teams adopting AI on their own terms, with inconsistent standards and competing priorities.

Retailers don't need another AI roadmap before the holidays. They need a structure that can actually hold up. That starts in three places:

Settle ownership before you scale the tool. Ownership of martech and AI is still uneven. Research from Cordial and Org.Works found just 37% of retailers house martech inside marketing and 20% inside IT, with the rest scattered wherever nobody pushed back hard enough to claim it. 

The organizations getting it right follow what Org.Works CEO Janet Sherlock has said: “IT owns the rails. Marketing owns the trains.” Infrastructure, integrations, security, and enterprise standards belong to IT; customer strategy, content, campaigns, and brand guardrails belong to marketing.

Build decision rights into the operating model. (aka, decide who decides.) Every marketing organization I talk to right now is asking some version of the same question: not “how do we add AI?” but “how do we build an organization and an operating model fast enough to keep pace with innovation and the customer?”

Content and creative are good examples. Most retailers still keep tight control over brand and creative work, and for good reason. Copywriters and creative teams have spent years developing the keen judgment that keeps a brand consistent. Handing some of that work to AI can understandably feel like giving up control. So the instinct has been to limit what AI can touch. The better approach is to build the brand rules and creative judgment into the workflow itself, to determine which creative or content is appropriate for AI support, and add human oversight to ensure brand consistency.

The same applies to organizational change. The retailers moving fastest aren't adding roles reactively. They establish the core structure and decision rights first, see where the pressure remains, and then scale.

Solve for the skills gap before you launch more tools. Skills gaps outrank legacy technology, budget, and executive alignment as the core barrier to AI readiness. Handing employees an AI tool and calling it a training program won't close this gap. The answer lives in organizational design, in updated hiring expectations around AI fluency, and in training programs that give employees equal access to learn, explore, and build to succeed.

The gap is forcing new roles into existence: AI content specialists, AI creative directors, and in some organizations, someone whose entire job is AI governance. These aren't technology roles bolted onto marketing. They're evidence that the structure itself is being redrawn.

As retailers finalize their plans for the holiday season, the ones who will come out ahead won't be the ones with the best tools. They'll be the ones who fixed the structure underneath to optimize them.