CMSWire: MAICON 2026 Recap - Who Will Train the Marketers Who Review Agents?

In my latest CMSWire article, I recap MAICON 2026 in Cleveland, where nearly 2,000 attendees gathered for an agenda that assumed everyone in the room already uses AI tools and wants to build with them. Paul Roetzer organized his opening keynote around work compression: with agents handling drafting, research and production, senior and junior staff can each get roughly 90% of the way through work that used to be split between them.

That compression creates a succession problem. Leaders who replace entry-level roles with agents remove the jobs where marketers build the judgment that senior roles depend on. Roetzer also pointed out that a tenfold increase in output brings a tenfold increase in review, because a qualified person still has to read, correct and approve the final 10% of every piece. Mike Kaput of SmarterX, whom I interviewed on The Agile Brand ahead of the event, suggested treating entry-level jobs as apprenticeships and called hours saved a short-sighted end-state metric.

The article also covers mechanism choice as a way to keep review load manageable, the split between descriptive and normative work, and why the review tax belongs in any accounting of AI efficiency gains. Read the full article on CMSWire.