We've built real-time martech stacks. Then bottlenecked them with human-time decisions. Every marketer knows this pain. You've got real-time personalization, identity resolution, clean rooms, orchestration engines, and a dozen other sophisticated tools. Your martech stack is a marvel of modern engineering. But how do you actually use it? Through educated guesses, periodic reviews, and 'strategic adjustments.' It's like steering an ocean liner with janky controls in fog. The truth is that we're running complex, real-time marketing infrastructure with human decision-making that's anything but real-time. We make slow decisions with incomplete data, wait weeks/months to see results, then make more slow decisions. We're the bottleneck in our own operation. The shift isn't just about adding AI - it's about fundamentally changing how we operate. Moving from: - Human-in-critical-path → Human-in-loop - Quarterly optimization → Continuous learning - Segmentation guesswork → Scale experimentation - Perfect control → Directional correctness Here's what this means practically: - Focus on the unsexy: Invest heavily in high-quality customer signals, context and the infra to support it - Define the experience we want for our customers declaratively - what we want instead of imperatively (step-by-step how to do it) - Let the model understand our customers deeply and execute the experience for them - Monitor and shape strategy vs micromanaging execution The question is whether we're ready to let go of the illusion of control and let the model navigate. *Originally published [here](https://x.com/barusebi/status/1851350883621306597)*