"Bring out your dead!" John Cleese shouts in a sketch in the film, "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," which Gary Survis, an operating partner at Insight Partners, showed at the beginning of his lecture at the Globes MAD 2026 Conference. "I'm not dead," one character in the movie says, but the people around him in the sketch won't accept this. "He's very ill," they say. "I feel fine," he still insists. The scene ends with the character being hit on the head with a club, leaving no doubt in the matter.
"Marketing as we have known it is dead," says Survis, "and you, the man with the club, will have to deliver the final blow." He hurriedly pacifies the audience, which consists mainly of marketing people, by saying that the industry has done many fine and creative things, based on a profound understanding of people. He nevertheless goes on to say, "To move forward, we'll have to let go a large part of what worked for us until 2019. Fortunately, there is an heir after every death."
Insight Partners is a venture capital fund with 550 active investments and $90 billion in capital. The fund is very active in Israel with exits such as Wiz, monday.com, and SentinelOne on its resume. As a partner in Insight's Onsite team, which provides professional support for the startups in which it invests, Survis is familiar with both sides of the subject. On the one hand, he is advising startups in all areas of life in which they must now change their marketing policies. On the other hand, he works closely with companies whose core activity is marketing and which are planning to lead a revolutionary change in the market.
"Flooding has Become Our Routine"
Survis wants to soothe the audience. He emphasizes that even if the sense of pressure surrounding AI is enervating, this does not mean that it is too late to do anything. He says that no one can really follow the rapid pace of change.
"We are in a very confusing time," he says. "Even the newspaper headlines are not giving us clear messages about the direction in which the world is headed and what we should do about everything that is happening." He notes that there were no fewer than 85 major announcements of products or new capabilities by AI companies over the past year and admits, "No one can keep track of all of this. Even I am incapable of following all the innovations and that is part of my job definition."
He adds, "The never-ending effort to understand what is happening in the world has created a feeling of disorientation that has become part of our daily work experience. Sometimes there are innovations that overshadow everything else and must be recognized." As an example, he cites Claude Mythos as a tool that is changing the rules of the game and requiring users to readapt themselves "just when you thought that you had finally got it right."
The current magic word is Agentic AI - artificial intelligence based on agents such as Claude Code or Base44. Survis presents figures showing that 79% of enterprises have adopted Agentic AI at some level and 23% of them have already transitioned from the pilot stage to regular use. At the same time, "They are part of the direct process with the customer in only 11% of the cases. In other words, it is only behind the scenes. The great promise has not yet been fulfilled," Survis explains and sums up by saying, "Companies that are the quickest to close this gap will differentiate themselves from the rest of their category."
At the conference, Survis presented a survey by Boston Consulting Group showing that 32% of the companies leading the change are operating AI agents across all areas of activity, of which 8% are classed as fully autonomous. 26% have completed successful pilots and are in the assimilation stage, but their employees are experiencing difficulties in adapting. 42% of companies, the largest group, are at risk of being left behind. In these organizations, AI is helping employees perform tasks exclusively in the old ways without any change in the existing work methods.
Persuading a bot instead of the consumer
For the marketing manager, the most profound change is that the modern consumer no longer needs to talk with the company before deciding about its products. In the past, when deciding to accept a price bid or when comparing it, we entered a physical store or at least surfed websites and price comparison engines.
The situation today is completely different. We simply ask the chatbot what product is best. This is true for both simple consumer products and complex business products. "By the time the buyer reaches a place where we can influence him, he has already made a large part of the decision. At a minimum, he has a shortlist of candidates," Survis stresses.
This means that the marketing stages, including presenting and differentiating the product, must be conducted with bots in mind, not the human consumer, so that bots will select us. The data support this conceptual change; 69% of Google queries are classed as "zero click searches" - situations in which the results page, including the AI component, provide the user with the full answer without any need to access any website on the displayed list.
As the language models improve, the target audience's need for direct contact with the websites is declining. In an ordinary Google search, one click is registered for every 5-30 observed pages, but on Perplexity, an engine based on quotations from reliable sources, the ratio is one click per 195 queries. On ChatGPT, the ratio is one click per 1,255 queries, indicating that the users almost never consult the sources on which the model is based. Claude is considered the most "extractive" model - it does the best job of extracting insights from the sources. Users find it necessary to go on from the answer to the primary source in only one of 20,000 cases. This gap highlights the fact that users almost always content themselves with the processed information without feeling any need to access the source.
Is it worthwhile simply sending an email to the target audience? Survis suggests reconsidering this, since 41% of the target audience realizes that a message has been written by AI, which has a negative impact on fondness for the brand. He adds, "Everyone is already using AI agents on their inboxes in any case, so if your content is not useful to them, they won't receive it."
Instead, if a searcher accesses the website, Survis stresses that it is very worthwhile giving him what he wants to hear. In this context, the AI tool benefits the brands because it enables them to adapt their website immediately to the needs of every user. "I hate the term 'personalization'," he says. "It sounds a little creepy. I prefer 'bespokeness'. In the future, the keyword will be bespokeness at scale."
Massive layoffs? Not so Fast
You have undoubtedly sensed that the hype around AI is substantially greater than its actual implementation. Survis presents a Boston Consulting Group survey showing that 96% of marketing managers agree that AI is transforming the market from end to end, but only 32% of them have managed to explain what they themselves are doing in a substantially different way.
Many managers envision a world in which their employees are replaced by AI agents who never get sick, complain, or need a vacation. Here is where Survis's biggest message to his audience comes in. In his opinion, AI will replace no employees. "How do I know this? Because I see what's happening in the most innovative companies in the field," he explains.
AI makes it possible to do more in both quantity and quality and to complete tasks that would be completely impossible without it. As Survis puts it, "Human beings are very good at using their available time. At best, they fill it with ambition. AI enables an organization to continue doing the same thing and stay in the same place with fewer employees, but organizations aspiring to do more need their employees." Survis presents the choice to his audience and poses to it the question, "Will your organization choose fewer employees and stagnation or keeping its employees while doing more? That's what your competitors will do."
If this is true, what explains the massive layoffs that we have been seeing recently? "Managers think that saying that we have figured out AI and are therefore streamlining sounds good," Survis says, but emphasizes that this is not the real reason. "Some of the layoffs are due to excessive hiring following the Covid-19 epidemic and some result from managers' belief that AI will enable them to streamline before this is actually the case," he explains.
The truly dramatic change taking place concerns job definitions. 67% of the marketing managers in large organizations believe that AI will fundamentally change the job definitions in an organization - in the coming year, not in the distant future. Survis presents several new roles in an organization's future marketing department, among them supervision of AI use for checking messages, management of creative AI agents, and training and testing of digital sales agents.
Survis says that the need for this rapid change "is a new Tower of Babylon between human language and machine language. When these are uncoordinated, the result is AI slop," in other words obviously machine-written messages that human beings will perceive as peculiar and unattractive. He adds, "We have to enter the bilingual era of the brand and learn to speak uniformly in the two languages."
Machine language will bring the consumer to you by persuading bots to offer your product or service to the consumer. On the other hand, human language is what will close the deal through feeling, story, and trust - the unique elements of human beings. "It is no wonder that many companies are making the CEO the face of the brand," Survis says. "They know that in a world in which all the messages are being written by the same machines, human messages are what make the difference. People must remain in control wherever you want to highlight your unique voice."
This bilinguality between man and machine was not an invention of the AI era. Survis points out that IKEA has been doing this for years. On the machine side, it has precise inventory management, transparent product pricing and specification, which remain uniform and relevant all over the world. On the human side, its display space design gives customers the feeling that someone is living in it and the Swedish experience, such as product names that feel familiar and comforting, despite having no real meaning, and Swedish food served in a cafeteria that involves the brand experience, not the furniture on sale. We do not meet many people when we shop at IKEA and most consumers do not really identify any faces with it, but we do feel the human touch in the shopping experience together with machine-like efficiency.
Survis says that in Insight Partners itself, 60% of the investments being considered by the fund did not come from the website, conferences, or word of mouth. They were proposed to the fund by AI models.
OK, what do we do now?
If you found this confusing and felt again that you must race ahead in order to avoid being left behind, but are unsure of how to do it, Survis proposes several principles for action. The first is to link the AI plan to concrete results. Halt any random efforts with new products going on the market, decide what you want AI to do for you, set quantifiable goals, and then really keep track of these results.
You should then reconsider the roles in the organization. Certain jobs can be combined and others split. Think about where AI will fit in with you.
Another interesting recommendation is to cut down in order to stand your ground. It is very difficult to build a new world while simultaneously operating the old one at the same capacity. Survis therefore recommends that managers ask themselves what activity can be suspended so that teams can be reassigned to the task of assimilating AI. In this context, he refers them to the book "Subtract," written by problem solving scholar Prof. Leidy Klotz at the University of Virginia.
"AI constantly demands more and more from us. This is its default option," Survis says. "But people must first of all subtract. This is an essential action that is rarely performed in the business world. Without first subtracting, there is no room for what we want to add and none of our changes will really be assimilated."
So is marketing really dead? Only if we do not save it. "You're standing there with the club," Survis summarizes his lecture. "You have the power. You can kill certain parts of marketing to make it stronger."
Full disclosure: The MAD conference was sponsored by Bank Hapoalim, El Al Airlines, Nespresso, Bezeq, Tnuva, Mifal HaPais (national lottery), Wolt, Macallan, and Nur.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on July 20, 2026.
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