Episode 27: Before You Hire Another Marketer, Watch This

The marketer you would have hired two years ago might not be the marketer you need today.

AI is making execution faster. Content is easier to produce. Research can happen in minutes. Entire workflows can now be automated.

But that doesn’t make marketers less valuable. It changes where their value comes from.

In this episode of Leaders of Growth Podcast, Milan Savov sits down with Emilia Korzynska, VP of Marketing at Userpilot, to discuss how AI is reshaping marketing roles, hiring decisions, team structures, content, and growth.

Having joined Userpilot as its first marketer and helped build the marketing function as the company scaled, Emilia shares the hiring decisions that worked, the ones that didn’t, and what she would do differently if she were building a SaaS marketing team today.

If you’re a founder, CEO, or CMO planning your next marketing hire, this episode offers a practical look at the people and skills that will matter as AI changes how marketing gets done.

1. Why AI Is Changing the Marketing Team

AI isn’t simply helping marketers do the same work faster.

It’s changing which work humans should be doing at all.

Emilia believes repetitive tasks traditionally handled by junior marketers will increasingly be automated, while judgment, creativity, strategic thinking, and the ability to build systems become more valuable.

That could also mean smaller teams. Instead of adding another specialist every time a new need appears, marketing leaders will need to think about how people, AI, and automation can work together.

The future isn’t about replacing the marketing team.

It’s about redesigning it.

2. The Three Marketers Emilia Would Hire Today

If Emilia were building a SaaS marketing team from scratch today, she would start with three very different profiles.

A performance marketer with years of hands-on experience and the judgment that comes from actually running campaigns.

An AI and systems person who can take a business objective and build workflows and automation around it.

And a creative content person who understands customers, has strong opinions, can work with people, and creates content that doesn’t feel like everything else AI can produce.

Performance. Systems. Creativity.

That’s Emilia’s foundation for a modern marketing team.

3. Why Systems Thinking Matters More Than Execution

One of the skills Emilia values most today is the ability to think in systems rather than tasks.

The strongest marketers don’t just ask what needs to be done.

They understand the desired outcome, break down how to get there, and figure out what should be done by a person, what can be automated, and what doesn’t need to happen at all.

But Emilia also warns against automating too early.

A process should work manually before you build AI around it. Otherwise, you’re simply scaling something that hasn’t been proven.

AI makes execution easier.

Knowing what deserves to be executed becomes the harder skill.

4. When to Hire In-House and When to Outsource

Not every marketing capability needs another full-time hire.

Emilia prefers keeping roles in-house when they require deep knowledge of the company, customers, product, and other teams.

But specialized execution can often make more sense externally.

A technical SEO audit, for example, may be better handled by specialists who perform that work across many companies rather than someone you hire full-time for an occasional need.

The question isn’t whether agencies or in-house teams are better.

It’s where the knowledge needs to live long term.

5. How AI Is Changing Content and Customer Discovery

Earlier in Userpilot’s growth, Emilia invested heavily in SEO because it was one of the company’s strongest acquisition channels.

Today, she wouldn’t build the same channel mix.

People who once searched Google for informational content can now get answers directly from AI platforms. At the same time, SEO still matters because strong content helps brands appear across traditional search, AI Overviews, and AI-generated recommendations.

That makes distribution, brand, and original thinking increasingly important.

When AI makes content production cheap, publishing more isn’t much of an advantage.

Creating something people actually want to consume and making sure it reaches them is.

Final Thoughts

AI isn’t removing the need for great marketers.

It’s removing more of the work that used to keep marketers busy.

That changes what SaaS companies should look for when hiring.

Less emphasis on task execution.

More emphasis on judgment, systems thinking, creativity, experience, and ownership.

The question for marketing leaders is no longer simply how many people they need.

It’s which people can create the most leverage when AI handles more of the execution.