The Title Is Disappearing. Good.

The job title I spent fifteen years earning is quietly disappearing from job boards. I'm going to argue that's good news, for the people who hold it most of all.

Look at who's hiring right now. AI-native companies run some of the highest-stakes customer conversations in the industry, every week, and almost none of them post "Head of Executive Briefing Center." They post Head of Customer Programs. Head of Customer Engagement. Field marketing and activation roles that fold briefings in alongside advisory boards, executive sponsorship, and customer marketing. The work is all there. The label isn't.

The room stopped being the anchor

For most of my career, this function had a physical address. Cisco had flagship centers. Salesforce built Innovation Centers. Zoom built Experience Centers. The room was the identity, and the team was scaffolding around the room. I ran one of those flagship programs, and I can tell you exactly what the room bought us: focus, a bit of theater, and a reason for a customer's executive team to clear an entire day. At its best it produced numbers I'm still proud of. A 97 NPS. More than a billion dollars in influenced pipeline. An eight-figure program run across nine global centers.

Then the ground moved. Briefings went virtual and never fully came back. Customer teams distributed. The room stopped being the place where trust gets built and became one of several places it can be. When a room stops being the anchor, a team named after the room starts looking for a truer name.

The second shift is quieter, and it matters more. Account teams and executive sponsors never cared which program a customer touchpoint belonged to. A briefing, an advisory board seat, an executive dinner, a field event: to the people carrying the number, these are one motion with one question attached. Does the relationship move? Companies organizing all of that under one leader, one budget, one strategy are not killing the briefing function. They're organizing the way their buyers already behave.

A senior peer said it to me plainly: these companies are hiring "one of everything," because they're moving too fast to know what the function should even be called yet. That's not confusion. That's consolidation happening in real time.

This is not an obituary

Cisco, Salesforce, Microsoft, and most of the enterprise establishment still run named briefing programs, still invest in them, and will for years, because at their scale the dedicated function earns its keep every quarter. Some of the best customer-trust work in the industry happens inside those programs, run by operators I'd put up against anyone. The label isn't dying of weakness. The work outgrew the container, and the container is being rebuilt bigger.

If you run this function, though, the fork is real, and pretending otherwise is the only wrong answer. One path is to stay a specialist in the established market, where named programs will need strong operators for a long time. That's a real career. The other is to reposition around the work instead of the room: customer programs, executive engagement, the whole portfolio. What doesn't survive is the middle. A resume anchored to a label, sent to companies that never used the label in the first place, gets pattern-matched against a job that doesn't exist at the target. I've watched it happen.

And if you're the one hiring for a consolidated role: the strongest candidate may not carry the title you posted. An operator who ran a briefing program at scale has been doing cross-functional orchestration, executive stakeholder management, and story-to-decision translation for years under a different name. Read for the function underneath the label. It works in both directions.

The craft is compounding

Here's the part that took me longest to see. The thing the title pointed at gets more valuable in an AI transition, not less. Strip away the room and the org chart line, and what's left is the actual craft: putting the right people in a conversation that moves a real decision, and building enough trust that the customer tells you the truth while it still matters. When the ground shifts under every buyer at once, that is the scarcest thing a company can field. Agents will handle more and more of what's repeatable. Somebody still has to prepare the people in the room, and know which room matters this quarter.

That's why I stopped defending the title. I spent fifteen years running the function and the last two rebuilding it with AI, and I'd rather follow the work to where it's going than guard the name it used to wear. The label is consolidating. The craft is compounding.