What great marketing teams are getting right in 2026

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Rise above the rest: The ones pulling ahead aren't using AI differently, they're thinking more clearly before they start. Join the conversation at Elevate, Oct. 28-29 in NYC.

The gap between a good marketing team and a great one always existed. What’s changed is visibility.

When AI handles execution, the question stops being “Can we make this?” and becomes “Is this worth making?” Teams that are clear thinkers pull ahead. Teams that aren’t create the same problems, just faster and at greater scale.

Elevate, monday.com’s flagship conference for ambitious leaders and practitioners, is Oct. 28–29 at the Javits Center in NYC. It’s where marketers go to get specific about that gap and what it takes to get ahead of it.

The brief is still the bottleneck

Everyone in marketing deals with fuzzy briefs. Lots of words, very little said. No clear sense of what makes the product distinctive, no defined audience, no bar for what good looks like. AI didn’t change that problem. It amplified it. Weak briefs produce weak output, just at greater speed and scale. Fuzzy positioning shows up across every channel. Shallow audience understanding surfaces in every asset. The constraint was never AI. It’s what you hand it.

The marketers pulling ahead aren’t necessarily using AI differently. They’re thinking more clearly before they start. That means sharper briefs with a defined outcome and a specific audience. It means asking what belief they’re trying to change. It means setting a quality bar before execution starts, not after.

At Elevate, the Dos and Don’ts with AI for Marketing panel gets specific about where this breaks down in practice. Jade Bonacolta, cofounder of Archimedes and a former LinkedIn and Google marketing leader; Noah Brier, cofounder of Alephic; and Dan Brooks, VP Brand at monday.com, will dig into where AI creates real value across the marketing function, where it’s misapplied, and how to tell the difference between a meaningful opportunity and a shiny distraction.

When speed is no longer the differentiator

When AI levels the playing field on time, capacity, and resources, taste becomes the competitive advantage.

Two marketers with identical AI capabilities produce completely different work. One sees output and thinks “that’ll do.” The other sees the same output and spots where it’s generic, where the claim isn’t credible, where the angle is obvious. They push.

The gap between those two isn’t technical. It’s editorial judgment. This is what rewarding good work looks like now. Volume and turnaround time aren’t the metrics anymore. The people raising the bar write sharper briefs, hold stronger review standards, and make the call to kill work that doesn’t meet it, even when shipping is faster. That judgment, knowing what’s worth making and what isn’t, is the skill that matters.

The scope widens

There’s a less obvious shift happening alongside this one, and it’s worth paying attention to. Marketing’s job used to end at the MQL handoff. Leads went to sales; visibility went with them. But if you want to build an agentic system that works across the full funnel, from first awareness to revenue won, you need to understand what happens after the handoff, how sales workflows operate, where the handoffs break, and what signals matter downstream.

The marketers building that kind of cross-functional fluency aren’t just marketing AI architects anymore. They’re GTM AI architects. The org chart is flattening, and roles are widening. The people who understand how the full motion connects have an outsize advantage.

Elevate is one of the few places where that kind of cross-functional exposure is part of the program. It goes beyond marketing sessions to put you in rooms with sales leaders, ops teams, and practitioners from functions you’d normally never sit next to. The Career Advancement panel—featuring Rafi Nulman, director of AI transformation at Meta, and Jean Kang of AdviceWithJean, among others—addresses how to build the kind of AI fluency that makes you invaluable across functions.

Elevate is where marketing roundtables with 90 marketing leaders get into the actual dilemmas they face today. They’ll discuss what is working, what isn’t, and what peers in other industries do differently. In the Dos and Don’ts panel, the practitioners running these decisions at scale share what they’ve learned. In the hallways between sessions, the conversations are often better than the sessions themselves. Marketing Brew readers can get 30% off general admission tickets with code MARKETINGBREW30, valid through Sept. 1.