Not Everyone Has to Build Agents

I feel the need to point out that we’re doing it again. We’re back in the early aughts telling everyone that they should learn how to code.

Coderschool, rejoice! I bet you’re having a field day right now.

But let’s just slow down for a minute and remember that the world is wonderful and glorious in part because we all possess different skillsets, innate talents, and interests. We don’t necessarily need or want everyone to be able to do the same things, and for them to be able to do them all equally well.

We’ve already learned this lesson the hard way. The U.S. educational system way overcorrected toward everyone learning coding instead of learning language, music, art, and critical thinking skills, and we now have sufficient evidence to suggest that it didn’t produce all of the results we were all hoping or anticipating that it would. 

The marketer’s identity crisis

The industry is currently obsessed with "vibe coding" and "prompt engineering," putting immense pressure on marketers to become pseudo-software engineers just to keep their seats at the table. High-level strategists are being bogged down by technical "builder" tasks such as debugging LLM chains and stitching together APIs rather than doing actual marketing.

Let's be honest: The majority of marketers didn't go into marketing in order to build agents.

This is like the meme that’s been around for a while related to a business person’s regrets whispered softly at the deathbed about maximizing shareholder value. The new one would be something along the lines of:

"I just wish I could have increased efficiency and efficacy of my integrated marketing initiatives by automating them more thoroughly using Claude code."

There will always be tinkerers, builders, and many of them will also be marketers, but the error is in assuming that everyone in marketing has to adopt a coder’s mindset in order to survive and thrive in the new era of AI. 

For marketers to survive in the new AI era, they don't need to code, but they also can't cede this vital orchestration task to the all of the usual suspects. At Kana, we believe that the role of the modern and future CMO is more closely aligned to that of a world-class conductor of an orchestra. They need to hold the baton, stand on the conductor's podium, and do the orchestration.

The conductor vs. the instrument maker

Conductors don’t spend their time carving violins from maple wood or restringing the harps. They don't need to be the best oboe player in the room. They do need to know what good sounds like, and they do need to know how to coach their musicians to play their best using the instruments they have access to all in concert with one another. 

In the world we're heading to, marketers are conducting agents that automate and execute tasks in a self-starting, self-correcting way. They're *not* conducting their regular array of ringers, consultants, and agencies. Preserving that kind of model (which has been the reigning one for the last decade) adds an unnecessary layer of indirection and removes the marketer from ground-level execution. 

A conductor’s value lies in their ability to see the "big picture," to interpret the score, and to lead a group of specialized experts to create something beautiful. As a marketer, you were hired to be the conductor. You were hired for your taste, your domain expertise, your judgment, your intuition, and your ability to connect a brand’s soul to a human audience.

Custom craft, not amateur construction

We believe marketers shouldn’t have to build their own agents. But that doesn't mean you should settle for a "one-size-fits-all" bot that doesn't understand your business.

The beauty of a solution like Kana is that it bridges the skills gap by removing the need for you to do the technical construction. Instead of handing you a toolbox and a manual, we build custom agentic applications tailored specifically to your specifications, your challenges, and your unique data feeds.

We don't expect you to be a developer because we are the experts in the architecture. Our team brings longstanding domain expertise in marketing to the table. We have engineered a platform that reflects that deep knowledge; so when we deploy a custom agent for your team, you can have real faith and trust that it was built for marketers, by marketers.

Furthermore, Kana doesn't require you to be a "whisperer" to get results. The platform learns from how you use the app, how the application is tackling your business challenges, and your broader institutional knowledge.

The bottom line

The goal of AI shouldn't be to turn every creative professional into a mediocre developer. It should be to liberate the strategist from the mundane.

Marketers don't need to learn to code, but in the new era they must master conducting and orchestration.