For years, a marketing team's value was measured by their headcount and their budget. That equation is breaking down. As AI moves from writing assistant to agentic orchestrator, the companies pulling ahead are driving more revenue with fewer people.
In this episode of Finite by Clarity, the B2B marketing podcast for technology CMOs, Jodi Norris sits down with Colin Piper to unpack what it takes to build a lean marketing team in the AI era. As BuildOps' first CMO, Colin inherited a team of fewer than ten and chose to grow it deliberately, to around 20 people in a 500-person company.
But Colin hasn't always worked with lean teams. Over ten years at Autodesk, he rose from early-stage product marketer during the company's move to the cloud to leading a 100-plus person marketing organisation across its construction technology vertical.
Having led marketing at both enterprise and startup scale, Colin offers a rare view of the trade-offs and advantages of lean B2B marketing teams in the age of AI.