The New Operating Model
Budgets are flat, agency spend is being cut, and AI has changed what a small team can deliver. Ballintra is built for this environment: executive-led strategy and hands-on execution, run as Modern Marketing Operations rather than headcount or retainers.
This is how Modern Marketing Operations works. Executive-led strategy paired with AI-enabled execution and global talent, assembled as a single accountable unit. No department overhead. No agency markup. Just senior leadership, AI agents that scale, and vetted resources working in concert.
The leader — a founder or operator who has held the P&L — owns the strategy and the outcomes. The AI handles velocity and precision in execution. Global talent delivers craft at speed. The result: enterprise-grade marketing delivered lean.
Source: Gartner 2025 CMO Spend Survey, of 402 marketing leaders across North America and Europe.
For two decades, companies grew marketing by adding headcount or paying holding-company agencies on retainer. That model is now under visible strain. Gartner's 2025 data shows the average share of budget going to agencies, in-house labor, and martech all declining in the same year — with 39% of CMOs actively cutting agency relationships and another 39% reducing labor.
For private equity sponsors and growth companies, the implication is direct: marketing can no longer be carried as fixed overhead disconnected from enterprise value. It has to run lean, move quickly, and tie to revenue.
The answer to a flat budget is not more billable hours — it is a different way of getting the work done. McKinsey estimates generative AI could add between $2.6 and $4.4 trillion in annual value across the functions it studied, with marketing and sales among the largest, and finds that campaigns which once took months of design, targeting, and testing can now ship in weeks or days.
Paired with vetted global technical and creative talent, AI-enabled operations let a lean, senior-led team produce work that once required a full department or a large agency roster — at a fraction of the fixed cost, and under direct executive ownership.
Source: McKinsey & Company, The economic potential of generative AI.
Buyers increasingly research vendors through AI assistants and generative search rather than a list of blue links. McKinsey's 2025 analysis frames the consequence plainly: as AI agents translate intent into curated recommendations, competition shifts away from visibility and raw marketing spend and toward relevance and positioning inside AI-powered ecosystems.
Practically, that means the work now includes making a brand, its executives, and its proprietary insight legible to models — through authoritative content, structured data, and a credible presence across the third-party sources these systems draw on. It is an extension of good positioning and PR, not a separate dark art.
Source: McKinsey & Company, Where AI will create value — and where it won't (2025).
Ballintra is not an agency and not a traditional consultancy. It is an executive-led operating model in which strategy and execution stay in the same hands — one seat orchestrating the whole go-to-market, not a specialist owning a fragment of it. The same engagement can set a PE portfolio company's go-to-market strategy and then build the website, run the campaigns, or cut the video — without handing the work down to junior teams or bolting on another vendor.