A single video changed how we think about marketing software.

In early 2025, Alex Rampell—General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz—gave a talk at the a16z LP Summit titled “Software is Eating Labor.” His thesis was simple but profound: software has spent 70 years digitizing information. Its next act is to actually do the work.

That talk is why Lane exists.

The Three Eras of Software

Rampell’s framework goes like this:

Era 1: Filing Cabinets Information lived on paper. Finding anything meant physically searching through folders. Scaling meant more cabinets, more floor space, more people to manage them.

Era 2: Databases Software digitized the filing cabinets. Travel agents got Sabre. Salespeople got Salesforce. Accountants got QuickBooks. The information was easier to search, share, and analyze—but humans still did all the work. The software just made the work slightly more efficient.

Era 3: Software Does the Job This is where we are now. Software doesn’t just store information about customer support tickets—it resolves them. It doesn’t just track sales leads—it calls them. It doesn’t just record invoices—it collects them.

The shift isn’t incremental. It’s categorical.

The Question We Asked

After watching Rampell’s talk, we asked ourselves: What does “software does the job” look like for marketing?

The marketing software landscape is firmly in Era 2. We have incredible tools for:

Scheduling posts (Buffer, Hootsuite)
Managing customer relationships (HubSpot, Salesforce)
Analyzing performance (Google Analytics, Mixpanel)
Storing brand assets (Dropbox, Brandfolder)

But who actually does the marketing? Humans. The software makes them more efficient, but it doesn’t replace the labor.

A marketing team still needs someone to:

Develop the content strategy
Write the posts
Ensure brand consistency
Adapt messaging for different channels
Analyze what’s working and adjust
Keep the brand voice consistent across touchpoints

That’s a lot of labor. And for most businesses—especially startups and small teams—it’s labor they can’t afford.

The Marketing Labor Problem

Here’s the uncomfortable math:

Role	Average Salary	What They Do
Marketing Manager	$95,000/yr	Strategy, coordination
Content Writer	$65,000/yr	Blog posts, social copy
Social Media Manager	$55,000/yr	Posting, engagement
Brand Manager	$85,000/yr	Consistency, guidelines
Total	$300,000/yr	A functional marketing team

Most startups don’t have $300K for marketing. So they do one of three things:

Founder does it — Diverts time from product and customers
Hire one generalist — Who’s stretched too thin to do anything well
Outsource to an agency — Expensive and often disconnected from the brand

None of these are good options. They’re just the least bad options given the constraints.

What If Software Did the Job?

Rampell’s examples include AI agents that:

Negotiate freight prices in real-time
Handle debt collection calls in multiple languages
Resolve customer support tickets without human intervention

These aren’t chatbots following scripts. They’re agents that understand context, make decisions, and execute tasks.

We asked: could the same approach work for marketing?

Not “AI-assisted marketing” where a human uses ChatGPT to write faster. Not “marketing automation” where you set up triggers and templates. But actual AI that:

Understands your brand deeply
Develops content strategy based on your goals
Creates content in your voice
Posts at optimal times
Learns from performance data
Adjusts approach based on what works

An AI CMO.

Meet Lane

That’s what we built.

Lane isn’t a template library or a scheduling tool. Lane is an AI agent that does the marketing job:

Brand Intelligence: Lane learns your brand—voice, values, visual style, audience—and maintains that understanding across every piece of content.

Strategic Thinking: Lane doesn’t just execute tasks. It develops strategy based on your goals, your audience, and what’s working in your market.

Content Creation: Blog posts, social content, email campaigns—created in your brand voice, not generic AI-speak.

Execution: Lane doesn’t hand you a content calendar and wish you luck. It posts, monitors, and adjusts.

Learning: Every campaign teaches Lane something about your audience. It gets better over time.

What’s Still Human?

We’re not claiming AI replaces all marketing judgment. Some things remain fundamentally human:

Taste: Knowing what’s right for your brand, not just what’s effective

Relationships: Building genuine connections with customers, partners, press

Crisis Response: When things go wrong, humans need to make the call

Creative Vision: The breakthrough ideas that define a brand

Ethics: Deciding what your brand stands for and won’t compromise on

Lane handles the 80% of marketing that’s execution, consistency, and optimization. Humans focus on the 20% that requires judgment, creativity, and relationships.

The Economics Shift

Rampell makes a crucial point about pricing: the traditional SaaS model (charging per “seat”) breaks when AI dramatically increases productivity.

If one marketer with AI tools can do the work of five, you don’t need five seats. The software company’s revenue drops 80%.

The solution is outcome-based pricing. Don’t charge for access to the tool—charge for the value delivered.

This connects to something we’ve been thinking about with A2A and x402: what happens when AI agents can pay for their own resources? When a marketing agent can pay $0.02 for an image generation, $0.003 for an LLM call, and deliver a complete campaign for a fraction of traditional costs?

The economics of marketing labor are about to change fundamentally.

The Bigger Picture

Rampell’s talk ends with a striking observation: the global labor market is measured in tens of trillions of dollars. The software market is hundreds of billions. If software can capture even a fraction of labor value, we’re talking about a transformation bigger than anything we’ve seen.

Marketing labor alone is estimated at $400+ billion globally. That’s the market that’s about to be disrupted.

We’re not building a better marketing tool. We’re building software that does marketing.

That’s why Lane exists.

The full a16z talk is worth watching. And if you’re thinking about what AI means for your marketing, we’d love to talk.