The Global Content Disconnect research surveyed 550 senior business leaders across nine countries and found that 89 percent of enterprises plan to expand into new markets within five years, yet only 9 percent can enter a new market quickly. Half have already lost revenue because of disconnected customer experiences. The larger the business becomes, the more granular the content operation has to become with it.
The career of Llibert Argerich, Thumbtack‘s first CMO, illustrates how that complexity changes as companies grow.
At eBay, he managed marketing across eight countries. At Udemy, the scope expanded to 65 languages, where pricing, the course catalog and the customer experience had to adapt from market to market. At Thumbtack, the challenge has taken another form.
“If you’re a homeowner, you don’t really care that we have 300,000 pros nationwide,” he says on the podcast In Other Words. “You care that we have the one pro who can come to your home at the time you need and do a good job.”
Thumbtack effectively operates across hundreds of thousands of hyperlocal marketplaces, each shaped by different customer needs, economics and seasonal patterns. Content that matters in Seattle, where moss removal might be a priority, has little relevance in Phoenix.
As companies grow, serving more customers does not simply mean producing more content. It means becoming more specific about who that content is for and where it will be used. That is where growth starts to put pressure on the content operation.
Why the old operating model no longer scales
Most content operations were designed for a manageable volume of assets created, reviewed and approved by people who understood the subject matter and could read what was going live.
AI has changed the volume. Marketing teams can now create far more content across channels and markets, while the systems used to govern it have not always developed at the same pace. The challenge is increasingly whether teams can verify and maintain what they produce.
That leaves organizations with a more difficult question than simply how much content they can produce. They also need to know how much of it they can verify, maintain and keep aligned with the standards of the business.
Ewan McIntyre, VP Analyst and Chief of Research in Gartner‘s marketing practice, put the problem into numbers in the 2026 CMO Spend Survey.
While 70 percent of CMOs say becoming an AI leader is a critical goal, only 30% say their internal marketing processes are mature enough to implement and scale AI effectively.
“The risk is that CMOs invest in AI tools faster than they build the data foundations, processes, governance and talent required to scale them,” Ewan said.
For companies pursuing international growth, AI can increase the amount of content they are capable of producing without removing the need to know whether that content is accurate and relevant for the customer receiving it.
More content means more to govern
AI has made it easier to generate content variations for different channels, audiences and markets. It has also increased the amount of content that needs to be checked, updated and governed.
That becomes especially difficult when teams are approving material in languages they cannot read or managing volumes that make manual review unrealistic.
Llibert described the tension on In Other Words.
“You just can’t unleash agents and say, okay, yeah, I trust that it’s going to do its job and connect to customers, because hallucinations are real.”
His answer is not to choose between AI and human judgment. This is an important distinction as companies give AI systems greater responsibility. “”The two things are highly complementary, and we can do amazing work by leveraging both.”
Llibert references the need for a robust evaluation layer, with people training models, assessing output and determining where systems can make decisions independently.
For content teams, that points toward a model where AI can extend quality processes across a volume of content that people alone could never review manually, while human judgment remains embedded in the system.
Infrastructure changes the economics of scale
Phrase CMO Jason Hemingway observes on the CMO Alliance podcast that many enterprise teams have invested heavily in understanding their customers, while the content delivered to those customers has not evolved with the same precision.
If businesses use AI primarily to increase output, they also increase the amount of content they need to control. If they use it to reach more customers with content suited to the market, audience and context, the infrastructure underneath that content becomes part of the growth model.
Mercari, Japan’s largest consumer-to-consumer marketplace with 23 million monthly users, faced that challenge as it expanded beyond its domestic market.
A small team needed product content to meet the same quality bar across every supported market.
By centralizing its content operations on the Phrase Platform, Mercari increased product language coverage by 250 percent and improved translation speed by 18 percent without adding headcount. New feature releases could also go live simultaneously across supported languages.
Mercari was able to support substantially more of its product experience without expanding the team at the same rate.
As international businesses become more complex, the content operation has to absorb more of that complexity without allowing cost and effort to increase at the same rate.
The compounding cost of falling behind
The cost of weak content operations does not stay fixed as a company expands. Every additional market increases the volume of content and the complexity of maintaining it.
Llibert frames the wider business requirement in terms any CFO would recognize.
“Marketing needs to be a profit center, not a cost center.”
That requires teams to understand what is driving performance, where investment is producing a return and what the data can genuinely prove.
If a business is investing in market expansion but cannot determine whether customers in those markets are receiving an experience that supports growth, part of that investment remains difficult to measure.
Most leadership teams know where their revenue comes from. The harder question is whether the content operation supporting that revenue can grow at the same rate. As markets become more specific, the ability to serve them becomes part of the economics of growth.
Watch the full conversation
Llibert Argerich, Thumbtack’s first-ever CMO, built an 11-channel growth engine for a marketplace of 300,000 home services professionals, where every zip code is effectively its own market.
He explains why Thumbtack is now embedding those professionals into AI platforms, and what influences whether a brand is recommended when the purchase decision happens inside AI conversations.
