Burn the old playbook. It’s time to rebuild the engine in the age of AI.

When AI is wrecking the old playbook and budgets are under a microscope, what are the winning teams doing? They aren’t bigger. They’re built differently. They’re automated, operationalized, and obsessed with impact. 

They’re not here for trends. They’re here for takeover. You want growth? Build the machine.

Or get out of the way.

1. You Don’t Need Bigger Teams. You Need Better Systems.

Throwing headcount at a problem is lazy. Modern teams build leverage, not layers. At Webflow, we increased AI-attributed signups from 2% to nearly 10% in under a year without growing headcount. And AI-driven traffic isn’t just different. It’s converting 6x higher than standard non-branded SEO traffic.

We did it by rethinking what “content velocity” means. We focused on automated content refreshes, SEO that predicts intent, and experimentation cycles that take days, not quarters. Output was up 5x. Time to impact was cut by 70%. The result? More qualified traffic, lower CAC, and a compounding pipeline.

• Automated SEO refreshes (5x output, 40%+ traffic spikes)
• Internal tools that turn webinars into evergreen content
• Time unlocked for real experiments, not ticket-chasing

Growth isn’t about doing more—it’s about doing what matters, faster. In a high-velocity environment, every action must directly ladder up to measurable outcomes. 

That means building workflows where speed, signal, and scale are connected. AI lets us compress time between insight and execution. That shift turns every content brief, launch, or update into a revenue-producing asset and not just a KPI vanity play.

Here are the hard truths:

• Action is cheap. Impact is currency. 
• Modern teams move fast and trace the outcome.
• Automation isn’t just efficiency. It’s amplification.
• Don’t just ask what’s working. Ask how fast you know it’s working.
  

2. Headcount Is a Crutch. Kill It.

We're past the era of empire-building orgs. This is the Shopify era: Prove AI can't do the job before hiring a human. That's gospel now.

Today’s marketing orgs win by being strategically thin, deploying AI to handle layers of execution, and empowering operators to become architects with the right tools. If you’re hiring to scale instead of systematizing, you’re already behind. Headcount doesn’t equal capacity anymore. Systems do.

In this era, a team of 5 with the right automation stack can outperform a team of 20 running playbooks from 2020. The winning teams are flatter, faster, and built around AI-augmented operators who think like analysts and move like entrepreneurs.

At Webflow, we added velocity, not bodies. Our SEO and content refresh velocity went up 5x by automating time-consuming tasks like audits, optimization, and interlinking. That freed up the team to run creative experiments and move from tactical work to strategic growth bets. Same team, exponential output.

What we did instead of adding headcount:

• Every team member became an automator, not an executor
• Upskilled operators to design, test, and deploy automations and not just execute playbooks
• Used AI to overhaul our affiliate outreach and drove huge lifts in reactivation and onboarding with smart segmentation and personalization
• AI-powered creative now drives scaled search, display, and video

Roles are now designed around ownership of outcomes, not ownership of functions. 

• You don’t run SEO: You run acquisition from organic. 
• You don’t run content: You run influence. 

That shift changes everything.

And yes, CFOs love it. Why? Because we’re doing more with less. We’re not asking for more budget to grow. We’re showing how better systems drive better results, faster and cheaper.

3. Visibility Isn’t PR. It’s Revenue

Forget press hits. Today, visibility is your pipeline (and is a growth channel and revenue engine). If AI can’t find you, neither can your customers. The old SEO game is dead. You’re not just ranking for keywords anymore, but are training LLMs to recommend you. 

How we made visibility profitable:

• Structured content specifically for how LLMs answer questions—not just for blue links
• Optimized for AI-native discoverability across SERPs and GPT-driven interfaces
• Built tools to gauge community sentiment (Reddit, Slack, etc.) and to double down fast where we see an uptick
• Launched faster product and content plays based on real-time sentiment signals
• Connected positive brand mentions and citations to metrics like signups, retention, and pipeline velocity
• Used dashboards and attribution models to track conversion from visibility spikes and double down fast

To win that visibility, your team needs to operate like performance marketers with content and brand efforts tied to real business KPIs. That’s how we’ve made “share of voice” a revenue lever. 

4. Upskill or GTFO

This team doesn’t do the status quo and we don’t just train people. We turn them into growth machines. This framework ensures we’re not just reacting, but are strategically rewiring how we operate. 

3-part Framework For Upskilling:

At Webflow, we’ve embedded AI into how we work, and more importantly, how we learn. We use a three-part framework to guide our upskilling investments:

1️⃣ Where can we adopt AI internally to drive real growth?
2️⃣ Where can we build with and for AI to stay ahead?
3️⃣ How is AI shifting market dynamics — and how do we respond?

Here's what that looks like:

• Every team member builds their own AI-powered workflow stack using tools like AirOps, SEMrush, Gumloop workflows, etc.
• We host monthly “show what you hacked” sessions for team demos on how they’re saving hours, scaling output, or generating new insights using AI
• We built internal tools to show how 1:1 training can evolve into company-wide accelerants
• We track upskilling wins like marketing experiments. We want compound returns, not one-off boosts

To finance and the board, this looks like operational leverage. Fixed headcount, expanding output, and a culture of continuous reinvention. We don’t just look for marketers anymore. We now look for product-minded growth thinkers who can turn insight into action and tools into leverage.

Going back to Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke’s mandate: “Before asking for more headcount, teams must demonstrate why AI can’t do the work.” That’s embedded into our upskilling and ideation process. As a marketing executive, it's a fundamental baseline for how I think about adding to my team, and requesting incremental budget from my CFO.

Final Word

Bigger teams? That’s old world. We build fast. We build lean. We build smart. AI isn’t a side project. It’s the operating system. Your team is either leveling up or dragging you down. This is performance architecture. And it makes every CFO drool—because we’re unlocking throughput, not asking for more budget.

And if you’re still waiting for someone to explain how it works? You’ve already lost.

Josh Grant, VP of Growth at Webflow, is a marketing executive with over a decade of experience leading and scaling growth, product marketing, brand, and go-to-market teams—from early-stage startups to multi-billion-dollar global enterprises. He's driven impact at every stage: launching new products, building self-serve revenue engines, scaling global growth, and reaccelerating revenue.

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