By 2026, retention marketers will spend 70% of their time on strategy and 30% on production as AI handles copywriting and design. The real work becomes defining what to send, to whom, and when, using knowledge of brand, customers, and margins that AI can't replicate.
If you're a one-person team or a small team, what does your job actually look like in 2026? What do you think that it looks like?
The biggest change is how people actually spend their time. So we kind of alluded to this, but like the old retention manager, they could spend 70% of their time just making things, writing copy, building emails, designing assets, and only a small portion, I guess, what, 30% or so on strategy, where now it kind of flipped in a sense where you should spend a bulk majority, maybe that's 70% now on strategy, and the kind of remaining percentage of that 30 is on production, where AI is going to handle the production grunt work that you never wanted to do in the first place. So the actual job of one person kind of comes down to the human. You own the strategy. What are we sending? Why are we sending this? Who are we sending this to and when? Right? Thinking about like the campaign calendar, lifecycle map, and frankly, kind of like the segmentation logic.
This is like the highest leverage point of the job anyways, and the part AI can't really do yet successfully. You still need someone who understands the brand, the customer, the product. The margins, and really the seasonality.
