An Ode to the Pragmatic Marketer: Two Realists Witness the Evolution

In the not so distant past, any time you searched for a marketer’s profile on LinkedIn, there were hard-coded tags affixed to every headline. It was as if marketers were in search of durable metadata that could accurately describe the job they wanted to do, but sometimes didn't fully get the chance. The descriptions typically followed a predictable evolutionary progress:

• Data-driven Marketers turned into….
• Performance Marketers, who turned into…
• Full Funnel Marketers, who turned into…
• Growth Marketers, who are itching to come up with a new subhead.

With the AI era upon us, and the Age of Authority taking root for content, engagement and experience, we've already found a couple of new rebrands making the rounds. From “AI Growth Engineer” to “Agentic Velocity Orchestrator,” marketers want to message above and beyond the function. But it might be time to stop and ask, is this necessary? After all, what SHOULD the next wave of marketer superlative really be? Is it time to just call it what it is…or what we want it to be? Is it time to welcome the age of the Pragmatic Marketer?

When it comes to this type of conversation, there is little doubt I’d want Tara DeZao, Sr. Product Marketing Director at Pegasystems, with me. A marketing leader extraordinaire whose own career has been a playbook dedicated to driving durable relationships with customers, Tara is a colleague and a friend. When I sat down with Tara at PegaWorld 2026, we got a chance to discuss some of the ways AI has impacted Marketing.

I keep thinking back to that conversation,

First up…the challenges.

1. Getting lost in the hype cycle: AI has been billed as an “automagical” cure-all to the end of humanity. But, as Tara noted, so much of this hyped-up discussion is just unrealistic. “This boils down to using the right AI for the right job,” Tara shared. “When you are implementing, you have to understand what outcome you actually want to achieve.”
   
2. Outcomes are not the same as outputs: The great trick of AI at the moment is that while business users are pushing for business outcomes, way too many people trapped in the never ending hype-cycle are touting outputs — the actual thing the AI spit out correctly—as an outcome and pricing accordingly. In reality, that’s an output. Tara noted that one way she has found to address this misunderstanding is to focus in on the tangible. For example, focus in on customer lifetime value. “If you think of customer lifetime value, you need to minimize operating costs. And, there may be a few areas you can do that with AI. But ultimately what you need to do is use AI throughout that customer’s lifetime value to augment their experience…to understand where the experience needs to be augmented…where the gaps are in the experience. That’s when we can scale personalization and really figure out what the customers want in the next year. It might be new messaging strategy. It might be new partners. It might be AI…getting all of our partner’s AI to work together. It might be totally new.”
   
3. Not knowing where to start: As an industry, there is a narrative that describes the blazing fast speed at which AI is being adopted and expanded. Everyone has an example of how someone they know in a department in the organization has set up agents to do everything and anything. This has created what can only be called Marketer Fomo at exponential scale. Some leaders have started to wonder if they are truly behind, wondering how everyone is so much farther ahead, when in reality, everyone is traversing a very similar maturity curve where experimentation feels like growing, even when the majority of them fail. Interestingly, thanks to what Tara notes is a time in which the Martech stack is finally starting to shrink and consolidate, it has left gaps that disrupt strategies focused on business outcomes and are far too often rooted in technology implementations instead. “People want to lead with the right AI for the right job…and they want to know that they are getting the outcome they wanted to achieve.”

So how does this shift to an age of the Pragmatic Marketer address these challenges and turn them into opportunities? Perhaps it starts with the very definition of pragmatism itself: turning into the realistic and logical and rejecting the dogmatic, abstract or theoretical. And for the Pragmatic Marketer, the sensible path forward leans into AI in service of the brand and the customer.

Tara’s advice: start at the end. More specifically, start with a solid business outcome in mind that can accelerated or amplified by the outputs of AI and results of ongoing automations. “If you are thinking about customer lifetime value…sustainable growth…you need to minimize operating costs,” Tara noted. “And there may be a few areas where you can do that with AI. But, ultimately, you need to use AI throughout that customer’s lifetime value to augment their experience, to understand where that experience needs to be augmented, where the gaps are in the experience. How can we scale things like personalization. Sure, it might be AI. But that might be a new messaging strategy. That might be new partners getting all their AI to work together. It might be a collab.”

At the end of the day, the Pragmatic Marketer is rooted in a reality that doesn’t just leverage AI as an occasional tool, but instead as an extension of their own experience and judgement. For this breed of marketer, data has always been at the core of their work, but the customer has been at the center of their mind’s eye. Aligning these two demands, something that once felt like a tug of war between customer expectation and a business’ capacity to meet goals, relies on AI to accelerate decisions with the expectation that over time, decisions have a velocity that is powered and directed by precision.

When Tara and I reconnect at Pegaworld 2027, what will we be talking about? What will the AI conversation be so many months from now? For Tara, there are a couple simple hopes:

• That we are talking about what we solved with AI, not what we were scared or intimidated by.
• That the return of taste is celebrated and has address the scourge of AI generated slop
• That the discussion of how fast something can be spun up is replaced with how well we made that precision decision to act

Regardless of what we discuss, I absolutely know that it will be a conversation with two business realists who still indulge in being creative marketing dreamers every now and then. Until then, go back and watch our conversation…I know I have.