The CMO’s 2027 Nightmare: When Agentic Teams Break and No One Cares
Marketing Unfiltered #80 → Inside a future where AI agents drive record revenue, crash your brand, burn out your team, and leave marketing leaders holding the bag.
Good Morning Leaders, happy Thursday.
We had a great response to John’s AI take last week. If you missed it, enjoy it below.
This week I picked up my crystal ball and offer a journal entry from a CMO and the challenges we are going to face.
» You can always let us know what you think by hitting reply (or emailing mu@dannydenhard.com) to lets us know directly or leaving a comment
The CMO’s 2027 Nightmare:
When Agentic Teams Break and No One Cares
By Danny Denhard - Connect With Me On LinkedIn
» 📆 Short On Time? Remind me to read later, add to your calendar - Apple / Google / Microsoft
27th April 2027
Today was a rough day.
Paul handed in his notice, his agentic team can’t keep up.
His team and their agents can’t do it anymore.
The site keeps going down and the Product team won’t help.
The API stays up. So everyone seems ok??
The rushed TikTok video with 20% discount code went viral (thanks Reddit).
We’ve had record API calls and TikTok shop sales.
We would have had record traffic but the bots took us down again. No-one seems to care.
The agent team went rogue and replied to numerous comments and caused another huge s-storm with legal. Our General Counsel wants heads or bots to roll but again the rest of leadership team just don’t care and happily point the finger to the revenue dashboard in green.
I asked the HR agents about what to do and how to handle all of this - to protect the team and it said there wasn’t a plan and needed to book into the remote HR company and it would be 5 days for an appointment.
It then reminded me of the company goals and I had to deliver on 2.5:1 ROI and we missed our revenue target by 12% last quarter.
Not to mention, it also reminded me of the headcount replacement policy - every headcount replacement needed a business case to be submitted. I’m all for HR agents to have performance in mind but this just ignores our people first value we all agreed on 2 weeks ago!
The CPO and CTO both refused my quick call request and SOS message on slack. I received automated agents saying when they’re available, in 3 days time!
3 DAYS!
My EA agent automatically booked the meeting and without waiting outside their next meeting together they’re not going to prioritise. Are they ever going to take this seriously? Or they are too high on their own supply.
The CEO told me to cheer up on our 1-2-1, “be happy I’m near target already”, but he never gets why the API being up but the site being down is an issue in 2027 and why the site downtime is causing long term brand issues.
Brand will be a massive issue if the APIs go down and performance drops after customers realise our product is just about good enough.
The COO and CRO are demanding performance, they don’t see the website as important since the recent agentic wins, but we are a consumer brand and our website is our home and hub.
When I asked my peer group on WhatsApp, they all said they’re experiencing the same sort of thing, how has it come to this?
LinkedIn is equally a negative read.
My exec coach told me this is where you need to step out and create critical distance, not step up or step in like I always do, I can’t save the day or the week when i’m too close to the action. Create critical distance!
He is right, I should do this.
Action? I need to revisit these 3 things:
My mental health, this isn’t helping me, my apple watch is telling me i’m at a dangerous stress level again
Time for me - a walk, a long lunch, a weekend without hundreds of slack pings and emails about the issues I raised and no-one else would fix
My org design and how AI is helping or hindering it, for everything the agents and claws have done well it’s done much badly or made my team so stressed and unhappy they’re all looking for an exit.
I can do this can’t I?
For the rest of this year and next, we are going to be full of challenging events, from new issues like agentic commerce, new agent and claw team members, humans battling with agreed company values and leadership teams fighting on if websites and social are important etc.
The truth is without working through the issues, mapping out scenario planning and creating plans (with backup plans) it could feel like an accelerated nightmare. If you don’t have a planning session booked in - I strongly recommend you create a session and lead from the front.
Help Is At Hand
I previously created an org design newsletter back in June and October last year, here are the slides with exercises you can move forward with - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1013vJLFdMg_qRyfJwprVnTfo1wQ6Rfa4t7bMphptIOk/edit?_bhlid=2eb0c6559ad174e72f28908b52356f7e8671fcb1&slide=id.p1#slide=id.p1
Here are a few ways you can be inspired and run an exercise to plan and re-shape your department moving forward:
Long Form Interview To Help
I interviewed Dr Kelly Monahan on preparing and building AI & helping to shape strong and flexible culture (watch on YouTube or listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Pocketcasts)
If you would like more future planning assistance, we have a 79 other posts full of helpful resources, here are 4 I hand selected to help you prepare for the above issues and build for the future:
Thanks for reading again today and have a great end to your week!
Danny Denhard
I look forward to seeing the sequel to this post where a human complains about their agentic manager 🙃