The Marketing Command Centers: A New Operating Model for Marketing in the Gen AI Era

"The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new." – Socrates??

In the first?article?of this series, we examined the transformative power of Generative AI (Gen AI) and its impact on marketing. Drawing inspiration from Daedalus, the master craftsman of Greek mythology, we saw how innovation — while powerful — comes with its own set of challenges and requires an entirely new way of thinking.?

But knowing that change is coming is one thing; building the right structure to harness it is another. This is where Marketing Command Centers (MCCs) come into play.?

Just as military command centers bring together intelligence, strategy, and execution to make high-stakes decisions in real-time, modern marketing organizations must operate with the same level of agility, insight, and precision. Traditional marketing operating models — built for a pre-AI world — are no longer sufficient. They need an overhaul.??

This article introduces a new operating model for marketing — one that allows CMOs to reposition marketing as a strategic powerhouse within their organizations. By implementing Strategic and Tactical Marketing Command Centers, companies can bridge the gap between AI-powered insights and real-world execution, ensuring that marketing shifts from a reactive function to a predictive and proactive force. So, let’s dive into how Marketing Command Centers will reshape the landscape of modern marketing.?

Why Command Centers?

Recent progress in AI has made it possible for us to use not only structured (generally quantitative) data but also unstructured language data in everyday applications.? This is game-changing because now we can extract insights from text and language data at a scale and speed that was not possible before or at best significantly limited.? For illustrative purposes, if about 10% of the content on a typical web page is numeric data, then these new capabilities increase the data we can leverage in decision-making by 10 times.? Organizations that embrace operating models that are well suited to leverage this wealth of insight will far outpace those that only use 10% of data accessible to them.???

Our current operating models are not designed to utilize the vast amounts of unstructured data to glean insights and operationalize them that are now possible.? The Command Center approach provides a good and familiar organizing principle that allows for leveraging vast amounts of data and applying them to drive specific outcomes quickly.? With this in mind, “Command Centers” are a useful organizing principle, that gives us a way to bring people, technology, and data together to accomplish key goals and objectives.? Here’s why command centers work:?

• Goal-Oriented Operations: Like military command centers, the MCC framework focuses on defined objectives with a team structure that integrates multiple functions. This makes quick, insight-led decision-making possible.???
• Access to Unprecedented Insights: Gen AI allows marketers to detect patterns and glean insights from vast datasets, beyond traditional sources. With this technology, we can spot trends across diverse research domains, from social media and academic studies to insights from consumer behavior and psychology.

Key Considerations in the New Operating Model?

There are several realities shaping today’s marketing organization, which need to be considered in designing the operating model of the future.???

1. Current Marketing Structure: Today, about 70% of marketing staff in a typical marketing organization are focused on execution, with only 30% dedicated to strategy. This balance needs to shift toward strategic roles to make full use of Gen AI.?
2. Technology Integration: Most companies have a mix of legacy and modern platforms that are co-mingled or partially integrated. While a complete overhaul isn’t feasible immediately, integrating Gen AI into existing systems is possible.?
3. Training and Adoption: While technological advancements are rapid, the pace of human adaptation lags. Workforce training will be essential, though adoption will begin within specific functions before spreading organization-wide.? Gen AI will give rise to new skills such as prompt design, human-technology interface (Augmented AI), and validation. Our teams will require training to quickly adapt to the new realities and new ways of working.??
4. Transformation Is More About People, Less About Technology: All technology transformations ultimately hinge on people. While Gen AI is evolving exponentially, human adaptability follows a linear path. Bill Gates's quote “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten," applies to Gen AI as well.? Technology can change swiftly, but transforming the mindset of an organization takes time. Moreover, organizational change moves at the pace of the "average," not the speed of the most progressive team members. The larger the organization, the more difficult it is to make sweeping changes. The implications of this mismatch in the pace of technology change and our ability to adapt to it must be factored into developing a pragmatic operating model.??
5. Cultural Evolution: Organizations are often rooted in legacy processes and past successes, making a shift to future-oriented, AI-driven approaches challenging.? Any large-scale changes will require changing the norms and culture of the organization, which are harder and slower to change.? An incremental approach will be more successful than an immediate overhaul.?

As a Trekkie, I akin this dynamic to “Kobayashi Maru.” A training routine in which a Starfleet cadet is put in a no-win situation. Captain Kirk was the only cadet who was able to break the code, and he was able to do so by changing the rules of the exercise. This underscores the importance of having people on our teams who are willing to deviate from the accepted norms of the organization and the leaders in the organization must be comfortable in giving them the space to do so.? Nonetheless, the above assumption holds unless your organization is entirely comprised of clones of Captain Kirk.??

The New Marketing Operating Model??

The marketing operating model of the future will comprise the Strategic Marketing Command Center (SMCC), and the Tactical Marketing Command Center (TMCC), which will be enabled by a few Centers of Excellence (COE).??These Marketing Command Centers will comprise small teams and be enabled by domain-specific AI-powered tools.??

1. Strategic Marketing Command Center (SMCC)?

The focus of the SMCC will be on developing long-term plans, and refining and optimizing them based on ongoing learning from tactics and ever-changing market trends.? So, what does this really mean? Let me demonstrate the role of SMCC with the following core areas of focus for SMCC.???

• Long-range Planning Hub??
• Adaptive Planning Hub?
• Innovation Hub???

Please note, that I am using these terms merely because they are familiar to us and can aid in conveying how they relate to each other. They should not be interpreted in absolute terms.? What I mean is that the definition of each must be taken with the context of the future we are describing here. For example, the time horizon for long-range planning is longer than adaptive planning, rather than a specific time horizon that these terms might imply such as 3-year, 5-year, 10-year, and so on.? Finally, these do not have to be distinct teams and rather represent the focus areas that the same set of individuals could address in different modalities. In other words, the set of individuals could shift from a long-range planning cycle to an adaptive planning cycle, and so on.???

1.1 Long-range Planning Hub?

First, strategy is always what CMOs are trained for but find it hard to commit sufficient time to it due to the realities of the day-to-day challenges and choices they face.? This may have to do with meeting the demands of the fast-paced and dynamic nature of the business environment that persists today or that the unexpected but urgent issues always take precedence over the important ones.? It is the irony of business life today that the tasks we seem to value the most are indeed ones we find hard to allocate our time to. As a result, strategic planning is often relegated to once-a-year exercise.??

?Second, even when we engage in strategic planning, we find ourselves drowning in a sea of data but light on the relevant insights necessary to meet the growing demands of the ever-evolving business environment.? Furthermore, new opportunities and challenges emerge at an ever-increasing rate, which makes the insights we might have gathered obsolete or at least stale.?

Finally, strategy is about making choices and trade-offs, which will be a core element but now we will have more insights and quickly available which will require us to shift from an annual or (tri-annual) approach to a continuous approach.???

The SMCC is the strategic hub of the Marketing Team. It develops robust strategies and plans and then translates those into strategic briefs.? Strategic briefs focus on the key business goals and outcomes marketers want to impact along with a specification of broad segments. The Strategic Briefs are reviewed and discussed with the TMCC and serve as a key mechanism to translate strategy into action.? It is plausible that the scope of SMCC will continue to evolve and expand as it gains traction through demonstrated outcomes.??

This Hub consists of small teams that will focus on the big-picture questions but now it will have a broader and deeper set of insights to make better decisions. This is enabled by the ability to consider many more alternatives and run through many more permutations and scenarios than possible previously.? Some of the questions they focus on include:?

• What customer segments should we focus on??

• Which markets should we focus on??

• How will we win???

• What are the gaps in our capabilities (people, process, technology, etc.)??

• How should we allocate our capital??

This team will use a wide range of AI-enabled tools such as AI agents, custom GPTs, and Scenario planning tools. The AI agents and custom GPTs will be specifically tailored to conduct market, industry, competitive, customer, and trend analyses and will be instrumental in establishing the dimensions and parameters for scenario analyses.??

These AI-enabled scenario planning tools will allow the strategists to evaluate vast amounts of scenarios in a matter of minutes.? These tools will use explainable and augmented AI incorporating input from strategists (human judgment). Take, for example, Aible, a San Francisco-based software company that delivers business impact by unlocking the value of structured and unstructured data using different types of AI.? Aible leverages AI, and Gen AI-augmented with expert judgment that can transform how organizations develop strategies.? Using these tools Marketing Strategists can create robust strategies, plans, and value propositions.?

Furthermore, many of these will not only create, evaluate, reduce, and refine scenarios, but also create multi-media presentations, and conversational videos that present the scenarios and strategies.??

1.2.? Adaptive Planning Hub??

This Hub will consist of a small team or teams that will focus on making ongoing refinements to our strategy.? As the name suggests adaptive planning is a flexible approach to planning that emphasizes the ability to respond quickly to changing circumstances and unexpected events. It involves continuously updating plans based on new information and changing conditions. Some of the questions this might focus on are:?

• Is our value proposition still resonating with our focus segments???

• What new market and competitive trends have emerged that might require us to refine our strategy???

• What are the ongoing strategy refinements and adjustments we need to make??

The Adaptive Planning Hub will use similar AI-enabled tools as the Long-range Planning Hub.?

1.3.? Innovation Hub??

Innovation is a critical but often overlooked aspect that can extend the durability of an organization or brand.? This hub focuses on continuously generating new business concepts and refining/enhancing current products/solutions. This is critical to ensure that our value proposition is relevant for customers and in sync with competitive developments. In addition, we will also need to focus on breakthrough or disruptive innovation to ensure that we continuously come up with new ways of meeting the ever-evolving customer needs and competitive landscape.?

This is where we can use AI-enabled simulations to test the different concepts. Furthermore, with Gen AI, we can create synthetic personas and synthetic panels of consumers representing specific segments to test how a new concept might appeal to them.? These panels will be constantly updated, validated, and calibrated with actual consumer research to ensure that they are representative of the underlying segments. The synthetic panels provide an on-demand market research capability. The Strategists will have access to query and get timely insights from this panel. This greatly reduces the time needed to achieve breakthrough solutions, which previously took months, or even years -- all at a fraction of the investment.??

For example, Canopy, a brand and innovation consulting firm utilizes Gen AI-enabled new product development services. They partner with Hot Cognition, an AI consultancy to develop and use synthetic personas and synthetic panels to deliver innovation that works at a speed that we have not seen in the past.????

Canopy and Hot Cognition refer to these personas as “Digital Twins,” data-enriched dynamic composites of your target, rooted in your research, but imbued with additional life context from real consumers. The Digital Twins are regularly updated as new research is conducted. The best part -- the Digital Twins bring your research to life in an iterative format that can be available for on-demand chat conversations and video report-outs.?

2.? Tactical Marketing Command Center (TMCC):??

The TMCC serves as the operations nerve center, responsible for developing, testing, executing, and optimizing marketing initiatives. While the SMCC crafts business objectives and long-term strategies, the TMCC ensures these strategies become real-world actions. Think of it as the engine that translates broad visions into campaigns, customer touchpoints, and measurable outcomes — quickly.???

Building a TMCC isn’t about massive teams — it’s about small, nimble groups with complementary skills that can act quickly and iterate based on outcomes. Each hub within the TMCC operates like a specialized task force, designed to deliver targeted results.? TMCC will comprise the following two areas:?

• Operations Hub?
• Optimization Hub?

2.1.? Operations Hub?

The Operations Hub takes the strategy briefs from the SMCC and turns them into detailed execution plans — who to target, what to say, when, and which channels to use.? It collaborates with Centers of Excellence (COEs) for data insights, audience segmentation, and creative inputs, ensuring that campaigns align with strategy and business goals.??

The operations Hub will be enabled by AI-based workflow and automation tools that will schedule, deploy, and orchestrate meaningful, relevant, and timely experiences across all inbound and outbound channels.????

2.2.? Optimization Hub?

The Optimization Hub focuses on constant fine-tuning — adjusting campaigns in real time to boost effectiveness. It evaluates early results and recommends changes (e.g., changing audience targeting, testing new creative elements, or reallocating budget).? It evaluates campaign performance against KPIs and suggests continuous improvements to ensure the best possible outcome.? This team ensures campaigns are agile, quickly pivoting based on new insights, and maximizing return on investment.??

The Optimization Hub will be enabled by sophisticated AI-powered decisioning, testing, and attribution tools.? Many off-the-shelf platforms are already integrating AI and Gen AI capabilities which makes the adoption of these technologies much easier.???

3. Centers of Excellence (COE)??

The Command Centers wouldn’t function without the expertise of specialized teams. The COEs ensure that insights, creativity, and customer journeys are seamlessly integrated into operations. The COEs comprise the following three key areas:?

• Insights Hub?
• Design Hub?
• Segment & Journey Hub????

3.1.? Insights Hub??

This Hub comprises experts in data analytics, market research, and competitive intelligence.? They collaborate with the SMCC and TMCC to meet their Insights needs and provide pragmatic recommendations and guidance to each command center.? They will be focused on delivering recommendations that are anchored in facts, and insights combined with their deep understanding of the customers, the market, and the trends.???

The Insights Hub’s data wizards ensure the TMCC and SMCC have access to timely and actionable insights. They use traditional analytics techniques and tools complemented by Gen AI tools to uncover hidden trends and patterns.? For example, these teams will use “Custom GPTs” that are designed for a specific task such as competitive intelligence, industry analyses, product assessments, segmentation, etc.???

3.2.? Design Hub??

This Hub comprises design, creative, writing, and editing experts. These creatives leverage AI tools to create compelling content that will resonate with target audiences. Automation accelerates design without compromising quality. In addition to their expertise in creative disciplines and a deep understanding of the brand guidelines, they will also have to be experts at using AI tools to create and validate the outputs.? This will require new skills in prompt design and validating content to ensure the accuracy and brand voice.?????

Additionally, designers will utilize AI-enabled automation tools to dynamically create and update content, based on simple design brief-based prompts. For example, this could include various versions for different markets, segments and/or channels. This capability will facilitate the scaling of hyper-personalized content, which has not been possible until now.?

There are numerous Gen AI applications already in the market that can generate text-to-audio, text-to-image, and text-to-video all based on Q&A-based prompts. For example, Adobe has integrated a generative AI feature inside all of its products and the Adobe Creative Cloud. In addition, there are many applications such as Midjourney, DALL-E2, Canva, and many others.??

3.3.? Segment & Journey Hub??

Today, we live in an omnichannel world, where the customers expect us to not only understand what they are trying to do “at the moment” but also to guide them in ways that can help them achieve their goals. To that end, this hub will comprise strategists who have a deep understanding of the customer segments, as well as an understanding of the customer’s intent, and where the customer is in their journey to accomplish their intended goal.? Using these insights, these strategists will help orchestrate relevant and meaningful customer experiences.? Strategists here map customer journeys, ensuring each touchpoint aligns with customer intent. They will collaborate with the Operations Hub to choreograph experiences that not only meet but anticipate customer needs using specialized AI-enabled tools.???

Conclusion: The Marketer's New Role??

This new reality will require CMOs to not only re-invent their operating model but also re-train existing staff and or attract new talent that possesses a very different set of skills than today.? First, the CMOs will need to reinvent themselves and become experts in change management.???

This new order will value skills over credentials, a strategic mindset over a tactical mindset, curiosity over experience, and change over the status quo.?

The future of marketing isn’t just about faster execution or slicker campaigns. It’s about shifting from tactical firefighting to strategic foresight. As AI takes over the mundane, marketers will spend more time crafting strategic marketing briefs focused on business outcomes rather than just campaign metrics and orchestrating compelling yet relevant experiences that win over consumers.?

This transformation won’t be easy — it requires CMOs to build cross-functional teams, foster a culture of experimentation, and embrace new tools and frameworks. But those who succeed will unlock the full potential of AI and reshape the future of marketing.?

So, the question isn’t if your marketing team will evolve — it’s how fast it can get there. ?