Marketing is now the job everyone in your business borrows.
That isn't a guess. In July, OpenAI published an analysis of more than 800,000 work messages from US ChatGPT users. It measured how often people use AI for tasks that belong to a different occupation. Marketing came out on top. Marketing tasks made up 8.9% of messages from people working outside marketing, the highest share of any function in the study.
So your finance lead drafts the LinkedIn posts. Your sales director writes the case study. Your operations manager rewrites the homepage on a Sunday afternoon. Each of them can do it now, and do it quickly.
The same report found this happens more in small teams. In workspaces of two to five people, 18.9% of messages were about someone else's job. In organisations of more than 100, it was 16.3%. Fewer specialists means the person closest to the problem picks it up.
Output was never the hard part
For most of my 20 years in marketing, production was the bottleneck. Getting a campaign out meant a copywriter, a designer, a developer and three rounds of amends. A small business without those people did very little marketing, because it couldn't produce very much.
AI has removed that bottleneck. Anyone in your business can produce a respectable email, landing page or post in minutes.
What it hasn't removed is the decision about what to produce, for whom, and what to stop doing. Which of your three customer segments deserves this quarter's budget. Which message your board will hear. Whether a campaign failed or needs another month. Which activity to cut so the rest gets done properly.
A finance director with ChatGPT can write a decent campaign email. They can't tell you whether it's the right campaign. That judgement comes from having run a lot of campaigns and watched which ones moved pipeline.
What crossover looks like from the inside
When I start work with a growing B2B business, I often find the same pattern. Four or five people produce marketing. None of them owns it.
You can spot it quickly. Three versions of the value proposition are live at once, on the website, the sales deck and LinkedIn. Content arrives in bursts whenever someone has a quiet week, then stops for a month. Nobody can say which activity produced last quarter's pipeline. When the board asks what marketing delivered, the answer is a list of things that were done.
This is the side effect of crossover. More output, less direction. Every individual piece might be good. Together they pull in different directions, and the business looks busy without getting anywhere.
Where crossover helps, and where it doesn't
I'm not arguing against it. Some crossover is plainly good for a small business.
Your sales lead can answer a prospect's question with a tailored one-pager the same afternoon. Your operations manager can fix a broken contact form without waiting a week for a developer. Anyone can get a first draft or a piece of research done in minutes rather than days. Keep all of that.
The trouble starts when crossover reaches the decisions. Positioning, priorities, budget allocation and reporting on what worked all need one owner. That person needs enough seniority to say no to good ideas that don't fit the plan, and enough experience to read results honestly.
The rule I work to is simple. Let anyone produce. Let one person decide.
The question every growing business now has to answer
AI has changed the question. It used to be "who can do our marketing?" Now almost anyone can. The better question is "who owns it?"
There are a few honest answers. A full-time marketing director will own it properly, at £120k+ in salary alone, with two to three months to recruit and a hire that's hard to reverse. An agency will execute well against a brief, but someone still has to write the brief and judge the results. A fractional CMO owns the plan and the reporting for a share of the cost. That's the work I do, but the principle holds whichever route you take.
The one answer that doesn't work is "everyone". That's the default AI has quietly handed to most small businesses.
What I'd do this month
If marketing in your business has spread across several people, three steps will bring it back under control.
- List everyone producing marketing, and what each person produced last month
- Name one owner, and the three decisions only they make
- Agree one measure linking marketing to pipeline, and report it monthly
The first step is usually the eye-opener. Most owners find more people doing marketing than they expected, and less of it connected to a plan.
Where this leaves you
AI has given your team the ability to do marketing. That's a real gain. Used well, it means a small business can produce the volume of a much larger one.
The businesses that benefit will be the ones that pair that output with ownership. One plan, one owner, one measure the board trusts. Everyone else still contributes. The difference is that their work adds up to something.
If you'd like to talk through who should own marketing in your business, . If you want to see how I use AI on live client work, including where it gets things wrong, the Agent Library shows the agents I run.
Source: OpenAI, "How AI is expanding what people do at work", July 2026, based on US ChatGPT usage data.
