2026 is The Year of the Full Stack AI Marketer

Build your AI team, maximize every lead, and know your customers better than anyone

Today is my last post of 2025. I’m taking a break next week :)

Let’s wrap up the year with how marketing can leverage from using AI next year.

Leverage is anything. How can you win? At the start of 2025, the advice was likely simple. Just use AI for some of your workflows. Very few marketers were using AI in a meaningful way.

Now, that’s changed. I’ve spent time with marketing teams that are becoming incredibly sophisticated in how they use AI to execute more effectively and better serve their customers.

Here’s where I’d focus my 2026 efforts. You’ll notice, many of these I’ve covered on this Substack:

1. Create Your Internal AI Team:

Stop working alone. Build three AI assistants:

a. Data Strategist: Upload data, get back incredible data visualizations with insights and actions. Move from data analysis to data actions.

Here’s an example I recently covered on MATG (Marketing Against the Grain); it’s a B2B dashboard I’m working on using Claude Opus 4.5. It turns a bunch of Google Worksheets into an incredible data visualization, along with key insights and actions.

b. Chief of Staff: Tracks your projects, reminds you what’s blocked, flags what’s at risk. Create a high-execution culture.

I gave a complete tutorial on how to build an AI-Powered Growth OS where AI would act as the chief of staff to help you run it. It would run sprints to drive fast-paced momentum, run monthly KPI reviews to drive accountability, and run ongoing retros to internalize learnings.

c. Content Strategist: Plugs into YouTube, Podcasts, finds ideas, hooks, and angles you turn into emails, media, and posts for your audience. Never be short on ideas

I gave an introductory tutorial for this use case in my last post.

In 2026, a solo marketer + AI assistants will dominate a solo marketer every time.

2. Make Every Lead Count:

Traffic’s dropping. You need more from less

a. Chat SDR: Your website chat becomes your first sales rep. It answers questions, qualifies visitors, and walks them through a demo. No more “thanks for your interest, someone will reach out.” Accelerate every deal.

Chat SDR is the evolution of your website. When everyone starts to gather their research from LLMs, they no longer need your website to do research. Instead, your website is your best salesperson.

b. Personalize Everything: Turn data and context into personalised email, chat, and webpages. Their industry, role, and actual problems. Segments are dead; it’s one to one now

We’ve implemented AI across all our email workflows to book meetings for sales, leading to an increase in 30% more meetings every month. We integrated AI into how the BDR team worked, leading to a huge increase in productivity, and we are continuing to add AI across all our sales workflows.

c. AI-Enabled Sales Rep: Before every call, your reps get a brief: deal summary, their pain points, and talking points that matter to them. Then the call recording becomes custom follow-up material for that specific company.

We’ve been working diligently to integrate AI functionality across our salesforce, resulting in a 10% increase in incremental deals won this year.

In 2026, you can’t afford to waste a lead, clicks are disappearing, and traffic will decrease; extract more from less.

3. Know Your Customer Better Than Anyone Else:

Obsess over Customers vs. Clicks.

a. AI Customer Twin: Build an AI version of your ideal customer. Run every campaign, email, and landing page past it before you ship. Get instant feedback.

This is one of my favourite AI use cases. I covered it in a tutorial here. Being able to get instant feedback from a synthetic version of your customer is a true cheat code.

b. Instant Research: Feed AI what your audience is saying across social, reviews, forums, YouTube, communities, sales calls, and chat conversations. Turn data into hyper-specific details about your customer.

Here’s an example from a small app I’ve built to demonstrate this concept. It will aggregate all conversations related to a “made-up” product across the internet. It instantly helps you to identify how customers speak about the problems you solve and where they do that.

c. Customer Vocabulary Engine: Map the exact words, phrases, and mental models your customers use so every marketer on your team writes with the same high-converting language. Always speak in your customer’s language.

Copywriting is a timeless skill to learn. The very first thing I did with AI was to build a course on copywriting lessons from a century ago. I used AI to create the lessons, but all the content was built on copywriting techniques made famous many decades ago.

So, AI can’t replace the importance of learning copywriting, but it can ensure you also speak in your customers’ language.

In 2026, the marketers who obsess over customer vs. clicks will win.

Have a great end of the year

Until Next Time,

Happy AI’fying

Kieran