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Key Takeaways
Marketing isn't redundant: Spotting what's good, and sounding human, is exactly the bit AI can't do.
The headline win is time: Marketing's website sprints went from two months to four days for new pages, because the team can now draft the work themselves.
AI creates space: The point isn't replacing the experts, it's clearing the rough draft first so they spend their skill where it counts.
Being non-technical isn't a barrier any more: With production's ways of working borrowed, experts on hand, and a culture of sharing, marketers can build.
Know when to stop: Getting to 90% completion of a task is the gift, knowing when to hand the last 10% to an expert is the skill.
Human judgement matters more, not less: Speed is easy now. Taste is the thing you're still paid for.
Matt and Krystal spend their days surrounded by developers and designers who build brilliant things for a living. Going AI native meant that they’re now a non-technical marketing team that’s learnt to build too. So here’s what got easier, what got harder, and why marketing is not at all redundant in the age of AI.
Meet the Marketeers
Introducing Matt and Krystal! Matt’s our Head of Marketing, with 25 years in the industry and nearly 3 years of that is with us. Then, Krystal’s our Marketing Manager who's been at Cube since 2019!
Between them they've watched marketing change more than once. Matt's seen email marketing become the ‘next hot thing’, seen digital marketing enter the scene and become the norm, and now he’s witnessing the impact of AI in Marketing. So, when he says this AI shift feels different, it’s grounded in real experience.
"This is the first time I've witnessed a change at this level. It's fundamental to how work is done." Matt Lawrence, Head of Marketing, 3 Sided Cube
Every day, the Marketing team is surrounded by people who build custom software for the American Red Cross, Glastonbury, and more. They’re well and truly part of the 3 Sided Cube team, but are firmly on the non-technical side of things. Or, we should say, that used to be the case!
The biggest advantage of being the non-technical team inside a software agency is that you're never on your own. When a merge looks terrifying or an AI rabbit hole gets too deep, there's a developer who does this in their sleep only one desk or Slack message away.
Fellow Cubes are the safety net and they’ve always been there. It just took a while to fully trust it.
Now the Marketing team builds. And going from "we write the brief" to "we also make the thing" is every bit as daunting as it sounds. There were nervous moments, a few sharp intakes of breath, and more than one "am I about to break the entire website" wobble, but no one was doing it alone.
Time to tell the tale!
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What used to take two months now takes four days
Let’s use the example of creating a landing page for a new marketing campaign. First, Marketing would write tickets for the pages they wanted, those would go in a backlog, get worked on across a sprint, and publish at the end. If we needed a new landing page for August, the team would start planning it in June. Two months, start to finish.
And that's just one example.
"From whole pages to copy changes, image changes, or even updating the office address in the website footer. You're looking at a two-month lead time."Matt Lawrence, Head of Marketing, 3 Sided Cube
Now, working on our virtual private server (VPS), the Marketing team can draft the new page themselves. Claude uses the VPS to get our existing website pages as a reference, so it works and looks like the live site, without actually making any live changes. Once the Marketing team is happy with the page, it goes to the design team for review, and then to a developer as a pull request where the changes finally get made to the live site. A super speedy turnaround we’ve seen done in as little as four days.
"We've gone from two months to four days, and that's massive."Matt Lawrence, Head of Marketing, 3 Sided Cube
As you can probably guess by the steps in the process, we still need experts who know what good actually looks like to make sure everything still runs smoothly. Instead, what happens is that AI creates space.
Marketing now does the rough first 80%, which frees our designers and developers to spend their expertise on the parts that actually need it! So rather than using a scheduled day to turn a wireframe of grey rectangles into a real page, they can turn their creative flair up to the max!
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Learning to build when you're not a builder
None of this was comfortable at first. Generating copy variations with AI is one thing, watching it create web pages and write code, as the non-technical person clicking the buttons, is another.
"It's daunting. That first time you use Claude in that way, you have to lean on it a lot. When you do your first merge and you've got GitHub and all these things you're not familiar with, you lean on Claude even more."Matt Lawrence, Head of Marketing, 3 Sided Cube
Being told to ‘merge a branch’, with what feels like the whole live website on the line, is a special kind of terror when you don't fully understand what a merge is. Thankfully, Matt and Krystal can both name the three things that stopped the daunting-ness from becoming a serious blocker.
1. They borrowed how production works.
The marketing team started scheduling time, writing tickets, and documenting decisions the same way that our dev teams do. That mattered because, not only did it give them a deeper appreciation of the process, but it meant that the handoff to the rest of the team was way more efficient. When you tell Claude "stop, write up everything we decided onto the ticket," the developer who picks it up later gets all the context they never would have seen in the private Claude chat.
2. The experts were the safety net.
Being surrounded by developers stopped being intimidating and became the biggest bonus imaginable! It was a relief to have technical Cubes on hand if a merge went sideways. Plus, our engineering team had built background skills into Claude that check work against Cube's security and accessibility standards so nobody's flying solo even when it feels like it.
3. Nobody pretended to be an expert.
A culture of sharing half-finished things rather than just polished victory laps made a huge difference! When you're falling down a Claude rabbit hole, you can go and ask the people who do this all day.
"Not being siloed makes me feel like I'm not crazy."Krystal Ellison, Marketing Manager, 3 Sided Cube
The penny-drop moment for Matt was seeing Jess, our Head of Delivery, build her own scheduling tool for the Project Management team.
"She built this scheduling tool based on the knowledge of what she wanted it to do, more than the knowledge of how to code it. If you've got the context and the requirements and know what you want something to do, you can take those first steps."Matt Lawrence, Head of Marketing, 3 Sided Cube
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But it wasn’t all plain sailing…
Matt and Krystal have been through the thick of it so they can give you the heads up on what to expect and how to overcome it:
1. You have to know when to stop
This has been a common theme through the whole Factory Rebuild series and is something both Matt and Krystal agree with. The cruellest trap when using AI is the last 10% of a task. You get to 90%, you can taste the finished thing, and so you keep prompting into the night to close the gap. Then you blink and you’ve lost hours on something that a human expert would’ve done in two minutes.
"I just kept going and going. I had an evening, and it was like, ‘It's gonna do this [thing], and then I'm done’. I lost sleep, and that is precious." Krystal Ellison, Marketing Manager, 3 Sided Cube
Matt had a similar experience where a teammate spent ages going back and forth with Claude over the little white edge on a sticker that wouldn't sit right. In the end, the best way forwards was to stop and hand the final 10% over to one of our product designers to perfect.
2. Beware the context switching
When you can suddenly do a bit of everything, you end up doing a bit of everything almost every day. And that takes a serious toll on your brain!
"There are days where I'll get off work and my head is swimming, my eyes are burning. There's so much context switching that it feels like a lot." Krystal Ellison, Marketing Manager, 3 Sided Cube
"It's tempting to have lots of different chats going at the same time. And that very quickly is not feasible." Matt Lawrence, Head of Marketing, 3 Sided Cube
This one isn't fully cracked yet, honestly. The fix for this one is unglamorous but simple. You need to set guardrails and boundaries for yourself and your team. Notice when you've been at it for two hours, and take a break.
(Our People team has a lot to say on this, covered in their Factory Rebuild blog 💚)
So, is marketing redundant now?
It's the obvious question. If anyone can generate a campaign in thirty seconds, what's a marketer for? We’ll let Matt do the talking on this one:
"The role of a marketer in all of this is being able to spot what's good and what's not. That comes from your training, your experience, and from the analysis too. If you know a certain channel or message performs, you hold onto that, and you don't get swayed by whatever your AI happens to produce." Matt Lawrence, Head of Marketing, 3 Sided Cube
At the end of the day, nothing can replace real-life experience. All your transferable skills, marketing roles, and gut instinct are the absolute opposite of artificial!
Plus, there’s a second reason that Krystal describes perfectly:
"People trust people and want to hear from them. I'm so turned off and I'll disengage when I see obvious AI slop on social media." Krystal Ellison, Marketing Manager, 3 Sided Cube
That’s why the tools that work best are the ones we work with to do the heavy lifting and give us time to truly focus on the key parts of the process like making sure we sound authentically Cube and land with clients in a way that talks to the pain they are actually feeling.
So, marketers are in no way redundant, but we can learn how to use AI effectively to take our marketing to the next level!
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Would they go back?
The biggest question! Some days, when the mental load is heavy and the context switching is on level 10,000, yes. But actually go back to the old way of working, permanently? No thank you!
"There's definitely an element of nostalgia. I miss the old glory days." Krystal Ellison, Marketing Manager, 3 Sided Cube
"I would go back to ‘simpler times’, but I wouldn't go back [to the old way of working]." Matt Lawrence, Head of Marketing, 3 Sided Cube
There’s always going to be upsides and downsides for both ways of working. The best mix is taking the good ol’ marketing tactics we know and love, and supercharging them with AI’s capabilities.
And who knows where we’ll be next year? You’ll just have to keep watch for our next Factory Rebuild check in to see for yourself 👀
Want more from the Factory Rebuild?
Catch up with our fellow Cubes from across all the different teams:
Disclaimer: We used AI in the process of writing this blog, but a human was still at the centre! We'd be poor advocates for going AI native if we didn't use AI to help write about it. The story is ours, the quotes are our team's own words, and every line got the human pass 💚
FAQs
Can a non-technical marketing team really build web pages with AI?
Yes, with guardrails. Cube's marketers draft new pages on a shared server where Claude has the brand context, then hand off to designers and developers for review before anything goes live. You don't need to code, but you do need a process and expert review.
How much faster is marketing with AI?
For our team, a new landing page went from a two-month sprint cycle down to just four days. The saving comes from marketing teams drafting the work themselves rather than waiting in a queue, not from cutting the expert review.
Will AI replace marketers?
No. AI makes producing content cheap and fast, which makes the human job of judging what's actually good, and keeping it sounding human, more valuable, not less. Marketers spot what works from training, experience and analysis.
What does "AI creates space" mean?
It's the idea that AI's value isn't doing a whole job end to end, but clearing the first 80% so skilled people spend their time on the parts that genuinely need them. For us, marketing drafting pages frees designers and developers for higher-value work.
How do you stop AI content sounding generic?
A tone-of-voice skill trained on how your team actually writes keeps AI output in your voice rather than defaulting to recognisable "AI slop." The human still edits, directs, and makes the final call.
Published on 4 September 2026, last updated on 4 September 2026