What would Growth Marketing really look like this year?
It has become an annual tradition here at Growth Marketing Pros to gather the brightest minds in our ecosystem and ask one critical question: What do you foresee happening in Growth or DemandGen marketing in 2026?
This year, over 70 top-tier marketing professionals shared their forecasts, and the responses provide incredible food for thought as we build out our strategies.
The overarching consensus is clear: 2026 is the year AI transitions from a mere buzzword into the foundational operating system of marketing. Growth professionals are moving away from manual tactical execution and leaning into building smart mechanisms, which ironically forces a return to the roots of human psychology and creativity.
Four Key Shifts Defining 2026
According to the community leaders, here are the four main pillars of change to prepare for:
- Search as the Ultimate Interface: Search is no longer just a traffic channel; it is becoming the main gateway where users expect direct answers, rather than just links to buy. SEO is shifting toward managing visibility and movement within AI-generated responses and dynamic results.
- Creative as a Strategic Asset: Content must be fast, video-driven, personal, and authentic. While AI will accelerate the pace of production, the human “hook” remains the absolute most crucial element for capturing attention and creating focus.
- Measurement via Controlled Experiments: We are moving away from blindly trusting dashboards to measuring true Lift through controlled experiments. AI will enable marketers to query data in natural language, basing decisions on the actual customer journey from ad exposure all the way to revenue.
- The Marketer as an Architect: The role is evolving from an operator who sets up internal campaigns to an architect. Marketers will now manage fleets of AI agents, build complex automations, and focus heavily on strategy and customer psychology.
The revolution has clearly begun, and these insights are just the starting point.
