The Positionless Marketer, Six Months After Connect 2026

David Hardy closed the final session of Optimove Connect 2026 with a prediction. Within three to five years, he told the room, manual campaign builds, channel-specific owners, and manual segmentation would disappear. In their place would come the Positionless, AI-augmented strategist, with job titles like business intent owner, decision architect, and AI steward. He invited anyone to challenge it. 

Six months later, the part worth challenging is the timeline. In a September 29 op-ed for Gaming Intelligence, Optimove founder and CEO Pini Yakuel described CRM marketers whose week sounds nothing like it did eighteen months ago. They now work with AI in three places at once: inside the platform, outside it, and on top of it. 

This post recaps what David Hardy, VP of Professional Services, and Paul O'Shea, VP of Customer Success EMEA, presented in London, and shows how far the role has moved since. 

Why Positionless, Why Now 

Two forces were colliding, David explained. Outside the business, AI had become agentic, generic marketing had stopped working, and regulation and taxation were squeezing margins. Inside it, insights, creative, execution, and optimization still sat in separate teams. Campaigns waited in queues, data waited on analysts, creative waited on designers, and tests took weeks. 

Positionless Marketing closes that gap. The benefits they laid out were concrete: campaigns launched in hours instead of weeks, and one marketer producing the campaign volume of a traditional five-to-seven-person CRM team. Both were clear that this is about giving people more scope, not cutting headcount. 

Who the Positionless Marketer Is 

Paul described six core CRM competencies that, in enterprise teams, often sit with six separate groups. That separation is where the bottlenecks live. A one-person CRM team is Positionless by default; larger teams get there by having people gradually expand across those areas. 

From his customer conversations, Paul added three traits. Positionless Marketers have a growth mindset, they want a wider remit and ownership of it, and they want to work in environments where bureaucracy doesn't slow them down. 

The Three Powers in One Workflow 

David's live demo started with a familiar question from a CMO: churn is rising, why, and what are we doing about it? 

1. Data Power. In the Migration Explorer report, 77% of new customers were churning before reaching the active lifecycle stage, and cohort reports showed survival rates falling in recent cohorts. Conclusion: acquisition quality had declined. No analyst, no waiting 
2. Optimization Power. In AI Decisioning Studio, David grouped the new-customer journeys and found only 8% of available optimization in use. He added Send Time Optimization and offer decisioning with 10% and 15% welcome bonus variants, so AI decides which customer gets which offer 
3. Creative Power. A solid but unpersonalized template became thousands of variants through data connections and liquid code: a personalized hero message, tier-based messaging, real-time win details, and upcoming sports events matched to product affinity 

His summary: one marketer, AI in the loop. 

SMB and Enterprise Models 

For iGaming Startups with one or two marketing generalists, a cycle that used to take two weeks (export, analyze, build, launch, report) could now happen in a day. For multi-brand, multi-region enterprises, Positionless looks different. Centers of excellence still set standards, commercial teams still define the offers, and regional pods keep their autonomy. AI matches the right offer to the right customer. 

As David put it, Positionless at scale doesn't remove structure. It removes the friction between the decision and the action. 

What Customers Told Paul O'Shea 

In the weeks before Connect, Paul interviewed clients about what changed when they went Positionless. They asked not to be named, but their stories were specific. 

Time back. A US client described needing far less outside support. His team built a library of pre-approved, on-brand templates, so a campaign needs no brief and no agency. He digs into analytics himself, down to adjusting a real-time event trigger to catch customers at the right moment. The biggest gain, he said, was time. 

Process debt, not just tech debt. An EMEA enterprise client admitted that long internal SLAs, sprints, and briefings meant campaigns took months to launch. Fixing the tools wasn't enough; the processes had to change too. His summary of life after the switch: he can do whatever he needs, whenever he wants. 

Standardize, automate, then optimize. A multi-brand enterprise found 10 to 20 versions of the same early-life journey across markets, with no fair way to compare them. They agreed on one best-practice structure, allowed local variation, and automated it. That freed the CRM team to focus on improving results week over week. 

Standards can't drop. On a production line, every person owns one checklist. When one marketer owns the whole campaign, those checklists have to become one. The same enterprise consolidated them into a single master checklist so quality and regulatory checks hold, even when a marketer works in a less familiar area. 

From monotony to growth. One client described his old role as monotonous: he watched others do parts of the campaign he knew he could do himself. Going Positionless gave him the room to contribute more. 

How the Role Has Advanced Since March 

In March, the Positionless Marketer used AI inside one platform. By September, Pini Yakuel described leading marketers working with AI in three places at once, through Optimove AI. Each one picks up a thread from the Connect session. 

Inside: From Adding Optimizations to Managing Agents 

In David's demo, the marketer added Send-Time Optimization and offer variants to a journey by hand. Today, in AI Decisioning Studio, the marketer defines a strategy, activates agents for journey, offer, content, and send time, then monitors and adjusts from one hub. The result is effectively an individual journey for every player across every channel, and no one builds them by hand. For some clients, Optimove AI decisioning agents have delivered an 87% increase in net revenue, three times higher average bet value, and 13.8% more deposits. 

OptiGenie goes a step further. A marketer can ask in plain language about segments, promotions, triggers, campaigns, journeys, or platform health, or have OptiGenie build those components outright. It hands every component back for review, and every campaign still needs marketer approval before it reaches a player. Paul's master checklist is now part of how the product works. 

Outside: The Work No Longer Starts in the Platform 

Through the Optimove MCP, a marketer can open Claude, ChatGPT, or Microsoft Copilot, describe what they want, and let Optimove do the work, with governance, frequency rules, and approvals intact. 

David's churn demo is a good example of what changed. In March, it took a walk through three reports and two screens. Now a CRM manager can prompt Claude to find high-value players likely to churn in the next two weeks, build the audience, draft the email and SMS campaigns, and have everything waiting in Optimove for review. Teams also use it for CRM audits, cross-brand audiences, daily reporting, and reactivation planning. 

The proof is in how teams are using it. A dozen marketers across ten brands assembled a four-million-customer audience overnight. One operator runs a ten-brand CRM from a single chat window, and another logged more than a thousand audience checks in two weeks. 

On Top: Apps for the Workflow No Product Ships 

Every operator has at least one workflow that exists only in their business. Optimove Custom Apps are built by Optimove AI engineers on top of the platform's data, creative, and optimization layers for exactly those needs. 

One live example gives a large operator visibility into which real-time events actually produced a campaign and which didn't, a gap that used to require support tickets to investigate one at a time. That's the same moment Paul's US client was tuning by hand in March. Work like this once needed a roadmap slot to justify it. Now it's worth building for a single client. 

The Positionless Marketer in March vs. September 

The job titles David floated in March now describe real work. Setting the strategy that agents carry out is what a decision architect does. Reviewing and approving what those agents build is what an AI steward does. The marketer still owns the result. 

In Summary 

At Connect 2026, David Hardy and Paul O'Shea showed the Positionless Marketer as one person running the full CRM cycle, with customers backing it up: time back, less process debt, one checklist, and room to grow. David gave the AI-augmented strategist three to five years. 

Six months later, that marketer works inside Optimove, outside it, and on top of it, directing the agents that do the building and approving what they produce. A few years ago, Pini introduced Positionless Marketing as the idea that marketers could do anything and be everything. In his words, it is now coming true beyond what he imagined. 

The question for CRM leaders is no longer whether the role will change. It's whether their team structure has caught up with how fast it already did. 

For more insights, contact us to request a demo.