Marketers Need This Profile to Get Hired in 2026 - The T-Shaped AI Marketer

A new wave of marketers will develop in 2026. And I see them being able to really scale a company on their own.

When the SaaS startup wave hit, we got this fancy new term called “growth” that basically means everything that make numbers go up.

Marketing, sales, product, partner management… you name it.

And with that came a new breed of marketers.

Growth hackers or growth marketers or whatever label stuck.

These folks were way more versatile than the typical slide-pushing, canva-loving marketers.

The whole idea was to have someone so flexible they could jump in wherever the biggest growth lever was hiding, experiment with it and pull it to scale a company.

Landing pages, ads, UX improvements. Viral product loops. Didn’t matter.

That’s how the T-shaped marketer was born.

What’s a T-shaped marketer?

A T-shaped marketer got broad knowledge across all marketing disciplines but deep expertise in one specific area.

With that deep knowledge, they could create explosive growth in their domain.

SEMRUSH had their take on it with the content experienced t-shaped marketer:

Then Buffer came along with a way more complex profile.

This was the typical first marketing hire at a startup who had to do literally everything.

I’d definitely put myself in Buffer’s bucket.

That was exactly my profile when I jumped into the startup world… or at least that’s what I developed in by doing everything myself back then.

And now… AI is here and the whole game is changing (again).

All marketers are becoming engineers

AI is becoming part of our daily routine and we all see it as the next big growth lever.

We’re moving into a world where setting up and directing AI agents will be our bread and butter… also for marketers. In a few years, things like content creation, SEO, PR and ads will be handled by AI.

The trick will be managing it so well that you get the best results possible. Therefore marketers will still need knowledge across all domains to judge whether AI is giving good results but most marketers will be freed from execution (at least to a certain degree).

So here’s what a future T-shaped marketing profile looks like.

The T-Shaped AI Marketer:

This marketer knows their way around all marketing channels well enough to direct AI for the best results. And they have deep technical knowledge to set up agents, workflows and prompts that actually work.

This profile can replace entire small marketing teams in startups or small businesses (once AI and agents reach a level where they deliver high-quality output).

In-depth disciplines of the T-Shaped AI marketer

Here’s what the T-shaped AI marketer needs to master:

• Prompt Engineering: That’s the heart of AI. If you can’t write solid prompts, you won’t get solid results. The AI marketer needs to be top-tier at prompting to get the best output (and to judge if that output is actually good, they need that broad knowledge across all marketing disciplines).

• Vibe Coding: The days of manually building landing pages, waiting on developers for small tools, or spending months on funnels are done. Future marketers need to do it themselves. Iterate fast. A/B test on the fly. Execute in hours, not months.

• Automation & Workflows: Whether it’s Zapier, N8N or Make, marketers have to build systems that handle the grunt work. Process excellence belongs to whoever controls the funnels and growth systems. Only they will be able to set things up lean and scalable.

• APIs & AI Agents: Marketers need to set up AI agents that execute marketing tasks. That’s how you clone yourself or build AI team members that speed everything up. So future marketers have to work with APIs, connect tools to agents and make the whole system run smoothly.

Final Words

Back in the SaaS days, founders thought one T-shaped marketer could scale a business to 7-figures. Sometimes they were right.

Now we’re entering a time where that’s definitely the case.

And I’m convinced it’ll go even further. One T-shaped AI marketer managing multiple agents the right way will scale companies to 8-figures.

The T-shaped AI marketer is in some companies already one of the most requested profiles. So here’s your wake-up call: develop your skillset in this direction or hire the right people early on.

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