Five Fluencies Every Marketing Leader Needs Now (Part 3)

In Part 1 of our blog series, we looked at what’s surviving the AI disruption of marketing: experienced talent with deep judgment and strategic expertise. With that in mind, what does that expertise actually look like in practice?

A recent piece by Savvy Matters CEO Shiv Singh, The Execution Layer Is Collapsing, offers a clear answer. Singh argues that as AI takes on more production, coordination, and reporting work, value shifts upward to broader leadership roles. He breaks that shift down into five specific fluencies marketing leaders now need.

1. Industry Fluency

This means understanding how your category actually works, not just how to market within it. For example, if you’re a CPG marketer, it’s inventory, store operations, retail media, and margins. For someone in financial services, it’s regulation, compliance, risk, and the emotions around money. For healthcare, it’s providers, payers, and patient journeys. As Singh says, “Generic marketing expertise is becoming easier to access by the day, while deep contextual judgment is becoming more valuable and more differentiated.”

2. AI Fluency

You’re probably familiar with how to prompt AI and use it as your assistant. What’s important to know now is that AI is an emerging labor force. The marketers who will lead the next era are the ones learning to orchestrate systems, test workflows, and lead combined human and AI teams.

3. Taste Fluency

As you can see and feel these days, AI has flooded the world with competent, polished, average work. How can your brand provide something that feels culturally alive and humanly true? A marketing leader’s job is to provide a unique point of view, not just plausible work.

4. Commercial Systems Fluency

How does the business actually sell, serve, distribute, and make money? In B2B, are you staying close to the sales pipeline and truly understanding what the buyers need? In consumer businesses, do you have close ties with channels, retailers, and the supply chain? The brand promise depends on operational realities that sit outside marketing’s traditional walls.

5. Financial Fluency

This is fluency that earns a marketer a seat at the table with the CFO. You need to be able to explain growth, demand, and where the business has advantage and exposure. Marketing leaders who can speak fluently about the P&L, not just the brand, are the ones increasingly trusted with bigger mandates.

What this means for how you build your team

There’s a meaningful shift in how marketing organizations think about resourcing. In many cases, the fastest way to inject these fluencies into an organization may not be through a full-time hire. You can embed fractional talent that brings experience from multiple companies and growth environments.

EM’s consultants are marketers with deep category expertise and judgment that comes from having done the work long enough to know what’s worth doing. If you’re thinking about how to structure your team, we’d like to help.

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series on how AI is reshaping the marketing profession. Read Part 1 and Part 2 here.