Hello experiMENTAList, it’s Sundar 👋

I’m a former Head of Marketing Science at Uber where I optimized $1Bn+ in spend across Brand, Performance, and Lifecycle. Now, I share weekly playbooks that help you prove and scale your Marketing ROI.

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Rarely do I write pieces like this but I've now had too many conversations to ignore. Below, I wanted to share the perspectives I'm hearing from all the Marketers I've been talking to through my advisory calls and podcast interviews.

I'll be honest: we’re in a period of intense pressure.

Now, the tougher part of this has been, as an eternal optimist, hearing the general tone of pessimism. I'm not hearing a lot of Marketers being genuinely excited.

The AI Pressure

The most obvious pressure Is AI.

Every CEO and CFO is asking their Marketing teams to move most, if not all, of their workflows to AI.

In theory, this sounds reasonable. In practice, most companies don't have the data infrastructure to support it. Teams are being asked to implement a technology that isn't sitting on the right foundation.

Two months in, the question becomes: "Where's the ROI on AI?" And most teams won’t have a clean answer.

Here's where it gets more fun: the word on the street is that AI is delivering values so then companies think their Marketing team isn’t delivering and they begin questioning the ROI of the Marketing team itself.

But the AI pressure doesn't stop there.

Now you're seeing LinkedIn posts saying you can replace Hubspot or Braze or some other MarTech tool with a vibe-coded version. You get executives with that in their mind, asking a Marketing team to cut back on important tools and replace them with homegrown solutions.

As we all know, for many B2B SaaS products, it's not just the product. It's the support, financing, and onboarding that make the product worth it. When you just focus on replacing the product with your in-home version, you neglect those other components, and all of a sudden you effectively have a band-aided solution.

The AI Pressure also leads to…

The Resource Pressure

Marketers are being asked to do more with less. Combining an unstable economy with pressure to profitability and assumptions that AI can replace most tasks leads to a fallacy that you can do more with less.

This isn't new to 2026. Think about how many times you've had a reorg and still been asked to continue, but now there is this overwhelming belief of “Hey, it doesn't matter if we've lost manpower, we can replace it with AI.”

Taking it a step further, when you combine resource pressure with AI pressure you create this notion that we can just employ a few “Super Marketers”.

These Super Marketers can launch 100 creatives and then vibe code the landing pages and do a git push on some bug fixes. Yolo. Heck, why don't we have them fix the martech stack while we're at it?

“You need pressure to create diamonds”. Thanks DeBeers.

The math doesn't actually work.

Let's say you had a team of 5 marketers. One runs paid, one owns lifecycle, one manages brand, one handles content, and one is your analyst. You lose 2 of them. AI doesn't replace a lifecycle marketer. It helps a lifecycle marketer move faster. There's a difference. The strategic thinking, the cross-functional relationships, the institutional knowledge isn’t going to be replaced by a prompt.

What you actually end up with is 3 people doing the work of 5, slower, with more errors, and more burnout.

And then there's the morale problem nobody wants to talk about.

When your team watches two colleagues get walked out and the replacement plan is "we'll use AI," something breaks. The people who stay start doing the math on themselves. Am I next? That existential pressure not only affects output but also quality of ideas, the willingness to take risks, and the desire to stay.

You can't vibe code culture back.

And finally we come to…

The Performance Pressure

Finally, Marketers are really feeling the pressure to prove the ROI of Marketing.

Just being asked to prove ROI itself is not a bad thing, and if you're spending millions of dollars, it should be assumed that you're gonna be asked to prove it. The pressure is coming from the timelines and the resources being allocated.

Marketing leaders are being asked to prove Brand in a matter of weeks and months, when we all know it takes much longer to show any sort of impact.

They’re also being asked to prove the impact of Performance Marketing without having the cultural support of turning channels off because it might growth. Uhhh… turning some part of the channel off is a basic requirement for any type of incrementality test.

Even Lifecycle teams are falling under the same traps and being asked to drive revenue often through spammy and brand degrading strategies.

Now, many of these might not seem like they're new problems, but the pressure to deliver has definitely gone up. You're seeing this through many of the layoffs at Block and Meta, where they're trying to justify the investments in AI.

“Great, thanks for pointing these out Sundar”

The reason I wrote this article though is to encourage the people reading this that you’re not alone. The feelings and emotions you’re processing are not unique to you or your situation and that the industry is going through one of the greatest technological changes since the internet. That’s quite a monumental shift, but with it comes opportunity.

So, what should Marketers do?

I’ve been thinking a lot about it but don’t have a structured thought so I’m going to spend this week thinking through and share it next week.

That’s it for this week!

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Stay experiMENTAL,

Sundar