Key Takeaways from the "Future of MOPs" Town Hall

Also - what role should your next marketing ops hire be?

In this edition:

1. Key Takeaways From the Future of MOPs Town Hall

2. POLL: Which Marketing Ops Hire Should You Prioritize?

3. Exclusive For Paid Subscribers: A Simple Way to Understand Data Warehouses, CDPs, and CRMs

4. Also - Please Help Scott Brinker and the Martech Community by Taking the AI & Data in Marketing Survey

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Orange County, CA Folks - The Art of What’s Possible in Marketing Automation (Lunch Provided!)

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Key Takeaways From the Future of MOPs Town Hall

We hosted a spicy session on where Marketing Ops is headed with Mike Rizzo, Jess Kao, and Paul Wilson, plus a surprise cameo from Kelly Jo. Here are the takeaways you can use this week.

1) The current state, high pressure and unclear asks

• Leadership wants AI but rarely defines the objective, budget, or timeline

• Interviews are about fixing demand gen, lifecycle, and ABM, not just tools

• MOPs is being asked to solve business problems

2) AI will not erase MOPs, it will erase order taking

• Build to spec work is fading

• Use agents for FAQs, ticket hygiene, list uploads, data cleanup

• Move humans to strategy, experimentation, measurement, and education

3) Own the art of the possible

• Standardize the campaign brief so agents can execute the mechanics

• Use freed time to teach new capabilities and propose better paths

• Your job shifts from shipping assets to unlocking outcomes

4) The real tech debt is fragmentation and weak documentation

• Decentralized buying creates duplicates and shadow IT

• Most teams use a fraction of current tools

• Fix with a living capability map, clear ownership, and a single pattern catalog

5) Plan for AI interoperability now

• Everyone is buying tools that do not talk to each other

• Align shared training data, interfaces, and governance

• Treat the stack like a product with standards and versioning

6) Who should lead AI in GTM, MOPs should, but prove it

• Bring use cases tied to customer and internal experience

• Report outcomes like cycle time, error rate, response rate, and hours saved

• Earn ownership by showing results

7) Skills that rise in value

• Business fluency across the GTM lifecycle and pipeline mechanics

• Communication range for execs, marketers, and engineers

• Technical depth where you choose to specialize

Practical actions you can take this quarter

• Map your capabilities, one page that ties core use cases to current tools

• Standardize campaign request, brief, and QA, then codify for agents

• Create a system of record for docs, owners, contracts, and sunsets

• Pilot one agent that removes repetitive toil, FAQs or list hygiene are good starts

• Define AI governance, data sources, PII policy, prompt libraries, approvals, logging

• Build a capability catalog with recommended patterns and example playbooks

• Consolidate tool overlap and deprecate duplicates with a clear policy

• Add monthly leadership updates, one slide on outcomes, one on the next unlock

• Cost model your top AI use cases so you know where to trigger models

• Schedule quarterly stack reviews to align capabilities with business goals

• Train the team on business storytelling and audience-based communication

• Keep leaders’ hands on with short keyboard sessions to see real constraints

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POLL: If You Had Budget for One New Marketing Ops Hire, Which Role Would You Prioritize?

Top Commentary on Social

I’d budget for a consulting partner who has a wide range of MOPs and SOPs talent, which can cover ALL of those bases for several hours per week and flex with you as you need them. Jonathan Kent

AI - Focused on Integrations between Tech Stack, Specific AI Tech and Prompt Design for better utilization within current tech stack for extended marketing team. Colin Campbell

Gonna give you the most reliable ops answer: “It depends” Tyler Moore

GTM engineer for prompting and managing AI across the tech stack Lauren Wagner

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