Introducing AirOps Champions: New Voices for a New Category

Today, we're launching the AirOps Champions Program. Over the past year, Content Engineering went from an emerging idea to a real discipline: new job titles, restructured teams, hundreds of operators graduating from AirOps Cohort. The operators at the front of this wave are building systems that are redefining how content marketing works. Now it's time for them to lead that conversation publicly.

Content Engineering is reshaping marketing

A year ago, Josh Spilker published "The Rise of the 10x Content Engineer" on this blog. The argument: the best content marketers were becoming system builders, not just writers.

Since then, the market reorganized. Teams restructured around engineering principles. Job boards filled with Content Engineer postings. Hundreds of operators graduated from AirOps Cohort.

The old playbook: write individual pieces by hand, optimize for a keyword, publish on a calendar, hope for the best. Content Engineering replaces that entire model. And the discipline is more adaptable than anyone expected.

• At an enterprise SaaS company, Content Engineering means automated refresh workflows that keep 700+ blog posts current and cited in AI search.
• At a marketplace, it's programmatic systems generating thousands of location-specific pages with brand voice intact.
• At a growth-stage startup, it's one person building an entire content operation: research to distribution.
• In financial services, it's compliance-safe content generation at scale across dozens of product lines.
• In healthcare, it's localized provider pages that rank in both traditional and AI search results.

Content creation, content refresh, internal linking, AEO optimization, offsite mentions, competitive intelligence: the applications keep expanding. If you still think of content marketing as "write posts, optimize for keywords, publish on a calendar," Content Engineering will stretch your mental model. It isn't a single workflow. It's a way of thinking about content as a system that compounds.

The operators who've made that leap are producing results that would have required a team of 10 just two years ago.

The tools are moving fast

The Content Engineering toolkit evolves faster than most organizations can track.

New models ship monthly. New integration patterns emerge weekly. The operators who thrive here are natural early adopters. They test new tools, share what works, and build in public.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a good example. Six months ago, most marketers hadn't heard of it. Now, MCP integrations let Content Engineers connect AI models directly to their CMS, analytics, and data sources. One workflow can pull performance data, identify underperforming pages, draft refreshed content using Brand Kit guidelines, and push to a CMS for review.

Most of that work stays invisible. The wins happen inside company walls. The experiments get shared in team Slack channels, not on public stages. The operators driving these results rarely get the recognition their work deserves.

The Champions Program exists to change that.

AirOps Champions: The thought leaders of Content Engineering

AirOps Champions is the program that recognizes and elevates the operators who are walking the walk: leaning into this new way of working, experimenting, driving real wins for their teams, and advancing their careers in the process.

There's a lot of hand-waving about AI. In our opinion, it’s the people building the most interesting systems who need to be telling those stories publicly: writing the playbooks, sharing the frameworks, lifting the rest of the marketing community into this new way of working.

That's the idea behind the AirOps Champions Program: give experienced Content Engineers a platform to lead this conversation in public. Share their use-cases. Hand them the microphone. Put them on billboards.

But this isn't about individual visibility alone. It's about lifting the entire community. Champions share what's working. Marketers get inspired, run their own experiments, and adopt Content Engineering mindsets.

That's why Champions launches alongside Cohort on March 31. Cohort brings new operators into Content Engineering. Champions gives experienced operators a way to lead it. Together, they create the cycle that turns a discipline into a real category.

Apply to become a Champion

A new profession is being built right now. If you're one of the people building it, we made this program for you.

The Champions program is open to AirOps customers and graduates of our Cohort program.

Learn more and apply to become a Champion.