Marketing’s AI evolution: from creativity to engineering

The marketing landscape has transformed, with artificial intelligence (AI) playing a significant role in its evolution. The focus has shifted from the hard part of building apps to the critical aspect of distribution, which is becoming increasingly crowded and expensive. In the current scenario, three key developments are taking place simultaneously, transforming marketing into an engineering discipline.

The journey towards this transformation began over fifteen years ago when marketing shifted from a craft based on intuition and taste to a more analytical discipline, with the emergence of the "growth hacker" concept. As technology advanced, AI took over the execution of marketing tasks, allowing for the automated generation of ad creative, writing of copy, running of experiments, and managing budgets in real-time.

This shift has been exemplified by Meta's AI-powered ad tools, which generate over €65 billion ($75 billion) in annual revenue and are utilized by nine million small businesses.

A growth engineer is a unique role that emerges from this changing landscape. Unlike traditional marketers or engineers, a growth engineer is a full-stack builder responsible for creating the machinery that drives growth, such as landing pages, experiment infrastructure, data pipelines, and agent workflows. The focus is on creating leverage, with a growth engineer building systems capable of running thousands of experiments rather than managing individual campaigns.

The role has rapidly gained popularity due to the availability of AI coding tools like Claude Code, enabling technical founders to quickly develop initial versions of their growth systems.

However, despite the rise of AI-driven marketing tools, the critical factor that distinguishes successful companies from their competitors remains distinctiveness. While AI can generate ads and perform tests, it cannot decide what to test, define a brand's identity, or create a unique market position. These aspects rely on the judgment and expertise of human growth engineers who understand their customer base and can leverage proprietary data and positioning to stand out in a crowded marketplace.

For European founders, the shift towards AI-driven marketing presents an opportunity to leverage their region's deep technical talent and build a competitive advantage. By treating growth as an engineering discipline, focusing on measurement based on real metrics, and either hiring or collaborating with growth engineers, European companies can develop robust systems to automatically optimize their marketing efforts.

This approach enables lean teams to perform constant experimentation, leveraging European tools such as Lovable for building and n8n for integrating AI agents, ultimately leading to better decision-making and improved results.

In conclusion, AI has not killed marketing; rather, it has elevated the importance of human expertise in orchestrating AI-driven systems. The growth engineer represents the new role needed to navigate this transformation and maintain a competitive edge in an increasingly crowded and expensive marketing landscape.