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What If I’m Wrong About AI and Marketing Jobs? (Thinks Out Loud 453)

People communicating in high-tech workspace to illustrate the question, "What if I'm wrong about AI and marketing jobs?"

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I’ve long believed that AI won’t steal your job, but rather that smart people who put AI to work will. After all, marketing, e-commerce, and customer acquisition roles are simply too complicated to automate away. No business leaders would ever be foolish enough to turn these critical functions over to artificial intelligence, right?

Well… let’s consider the alternative. I do believe that these roles will survive the age of AI. But, what if I’m wrong about AI in marketing and customer acquisition? It’s certainly true that senior leaders will cut costs or slow down hiring if the economy gets tight. Why wouldn’t they think about using more automation — and fewer people — in some cases?

In that case, the real question becomes how do you make sure you remain employed — and employable — no matter how big a role AI and automation play.

And that’s what this episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about.

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What If I’m Wrong About AI and Marketing Jobs? (Thinks Out Loud 453) — Headlines and Show Notes

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You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

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Running time: 19m 49s

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Transcript: What If I’m Wrong About AI and Marketing Jobs?

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about why AI won’t take your job, or more specifically, how to ensure AI doesn’t take your job. Since then, I’ve heard from a number of folks who think I’m minimizing the risks to folks currently working in marketing. Similarly, I’ve been doing a bunch of reading from other folks who know what they’re talking about about the future of all kinds of jobs, such as journalism and programming, from writers including Timothy B. Lee, Matthew Iglesias, Ezra Klein, Ben Buchanan, and Laurie Voss. I’m not going to lie, I find Laurie Voss’s writing about the effect of AI on programming jobs most compelling and most comparable to what I think marketers and digital marketers in particular will go through. Laurie writes,

this new layer of abstraction [of AI] will do what all the others did, which is improve the speed at which we can produce software of a given quality. Assuming AI lets us build software of equal quality much faster than we did before, this will produce either higher quality software produced in the same amount of time, more software of the same quality, or enormously more software of lower quality.

He concludes, “I think we will see all three at the same time.”

I agree. I’m very confident that the same will be true of content, messaging, campaigns, offers and ads. There will either be better quality, more at the same quality, or a lot more a terrible quality.

But what if I’m wrong? It doesn’t matter whether AI creates more jobs than it destroys, if the only job it destroys is yours.

I’m Tim Peter. This is Thinks Out Loud episode 453. And today we’re talking about what happens if AI threatens your marketing and e-commerce job. Let’s dive in.

Whenever I try to plan ahead, I use a simple scenario planning model I learned from Joel Garreau’s book, “Radical Evolution,” that says scenarios,

  1. Must conform to all known facts.
  2. Must identify “predetermineds,” future events so locked in by those of the past that as he writes, “they can usefully be considered inevitable.”
  3. Scenarios usually identify “critical uncertainties,” which are highly uncertain, but highly important events that might occur.
  4. You should assess any “wild cards,” any big shocks that could completely blow up your scenarios.
  5. They should identify embedded assumptions.
  6. And ideally, they should identify early warnings.

I’m in the process of gaming out some of the larger scenarios around AI and marketing and e-commerce. But for our purposes today, I think that all we really need to do is explore some of the facts and some of the predetermineds.

So what are the known facts, at least as I see them? Well…

  • One is that AI is here today. It exists. It’s not science fiction.
  • AI is capable of doing at least decent quality work in some areas of marketing and e-commerce.
  • The most relevant areas to marketing and e-commerce professionals include reasoning and content creation. And you can make the argument that it is also at least as good as the average marketing and e-commerce professional at other tasks, such as highlighting trends in analytics, forecasting demand, and pricing.
  • AI is also terrible in a couple of areas. You know, it’s laughably wrong sometimes, regardless of what it’s doing. Yes, we’re seeing fewer hallucinations on average, but its hallucinations are increasingly subtle and increasingly dangerous.
    • For instance, the study from Columbia Journalism Review found that, and this is a quote, “AI models incorrectly cited sources in more than 60 % of its searches,” often pointing researchers to incorrect or nonexistent sources.
  • Of course, one last fact that we need to take into account in our scenario is that marketing and commerce folks are continually asked to do more with less.

If there’s an economic downturn — about which I have some concerns but no predictions — or if your individual company faces a tougher marketplace, then cost-cutting CEOs and CFOs are going to let some people go from marketing. That’s a pretty universal predetermined reality. I wish it wouldn’t be the case. I generally advise clients not to do that, but we all know that it happens. I don’t see any world where that won’t be the case next time around, at least for some businesses and some business leaders.

The question that emerges then when it comes to AI taking jobs isn’t, is the AI better than a person? The question is, is AI going to convince the financial decision makers that its work is good enough. And I think it’s reasonable to say that the answer to that question will be yes, at least in the short term, and at least for some companies and some jobs. Yes, AI is good enough.

Research that McKinsey has done shows that marketing and sales is the function that most regularly puts generative AI to work today. 42% of surveyed companies are using gen AI in sales and marketing. And LinkedIn found, and this is a quote, “that 51% of businesses that adopted generative AI reported a revenue increase of 10% or more.” Anyone who assumes that AI won’t take any marketing or e-commerce jobs operates under the assumption that either:

A.) it’s not nearly good enough to do any work, which is objectively false, and…
B.) that decision makers don’t pay attention to their company’s bottom lines, which is objectively, falser, right?

That includes anything you might have heard me say in the past that made it seem like AI couldn’t take any jobs. I certainly never meant to suggest that, and I want to clear up that confusion right now.

I’d expect at a minimum that decision makers, at least some of them, will hire some fewer people and probably put more emphasis on technology that offsets any slower hiring. We’ll probably see some mix of junior and mid-level roles slow down if not get phased out entirely.

I frequently used the example of my late grandmother, who was a telephone operator back in the 1930s and 1940s, to illustrate the most likely scenario. You know, I’ve noted that telephone operators no longer exist, but that lots of people still work for Verizon, AT &T, and T-Mobile to show that technology absolutely makes some jobs go away, but that it creates lots of others. Of course, that’s still a problem if you’re the telephone operator.

Before I go any further on this topic, I want to be clear. I am not going to talk about what you would do if some AI super intelligence or artificial general intelligence springs up and deletes all the jobs. At that point, we are so far off the map that what you should do is far outside my expertise or experience. So I’m simply going to talk about the reality of, you know, we assume some jobs might go away.

So let’s assume that AI is gonna make some marketing and e-commerce jobs go away and focus on how you can keep that from happening to you and how you can quickly recover if it does. I’d also like to say that if your only demonstrable value to your organization is work that can be automated, a telephone operator plugging cables into a switchboard, then you probably are in trouble today.

But to be fair, if your only demonstrable value to your organization is work that can be automated, you were at risk long before AI came along. I doubt that many people listening to this show fall into that category, but it could happen. The job I see most commonly referenced in this area would be something like telemarketing. I’d also think about sales or CRM support roles and maybe some junior copywriters or media buyers being in particularly vulnerable spots. There’s just a lot of automation that can happen.

The key question, regardless though, is how you remain both relevant and fulfilled in your work. For me, there are three core areas you need to focus on, and they are:

  1. adaptability
  2. Integration of AI and human skills, and
  3. Personal branding.

I want to start by looking at adaptability. It probably won’t shock you that your ability to stay relevant and employed depends on your ability to adapt, to keep learning and growing. I talked a bit about this a couple of weeks ago, but let me drill into it just a bit more deeply.

We live in an era of constant change. LinkedIn’s economic graph team noted that, and this is a quote, “by 2030, 70% of the skills used in most jobs will change, with AI emerging as a catalyst.”

Shocking, I know.

That same report showed that, and again another quote, 10 % of workers hired today have job titles that didn’t exist in the 2000, and that in the US, it’s closer to 20%. Those jobs simply are new. In other words, your continued relevance starts with your adaptability. Some of the jobs that exist today will not exist, and some jobs that will exist in the future don’t exist yet.

If you’re unwilling to adapt, you’re likely going to find yourself falling behind. As the LinkedIn report stated, and again, quote, “38% of global C-suite executives prioritize agility when considering entry-level candidates for their organizations, according to recent LinkedIn research. Companies want individuals who can move through different roles and stages within a company and those who consistently re-skill and up-skill to change with the business.”

They know that the jobs they’re going to need in the future might not be that same for the people they’re hiring today, and so they want people who are able to move without having to start from scratch. And while the LinkedIn research says that many companies are investing in training to help their teams re-skill, the McKinsey study that I mentioned earlier tells a slightly different story.

It found that only 24% of organizations have re-skilled more than 20% of their employees in the last three years. And while 52% expect to re-skill more than 20% of their employees over the next three years, only 19% expect to re-skill more than 50% of their workforce. Let me put that in other words. You, personally, are responsible for your own training and learning if you want to stay relevant. Your company may provide you training, the good ones certainly will, but ultimately it’s your responsibility. If you’re not putting in the work, you are going to find yourself sitting on the sidelines.

Some of that training will absolutely need to be focused on artificial intelligence and greater comfort with data. Just as we saw when computers and the internet entered the workplace. And I should say, as people saw, as computers came before me. But folks have needed to have those skills. I’m amazed that I still sometimes run across job postings and resumes that talk about things like “proficiency with office suites, Word, Excel, PowerPoint,” that kind of thing, for mid-career jobs or higher.

I mean… dude. Are there many people in those roles who don’t have those skills?

So yes, your technical capabilities matter and those technical capabilities will evolve and are continuing to evolve. That’s a fact. But a huge amount of your marketability as an individual depends more on you being a strategic and creative human. A separate LinkedIn report detailed the most in-demand skills for 2024 and lists these five, after adaptability. The five that they list though are communication, customer service, leadership, project management, and management. Yes, analytics cruises in at number six. Being able to listen to and talk with machines is going to matter.

But ultimately, your job in marketing and e-commerce involves talking to people, customers, coworkers, your community. If you can’t communicate, if you can’t take care of customers, if you can’t connect with your peers and employees, you’re in much bigger trouble than if you don’t know the difference between, say, transformers and diffusion models in modern AI.

In fact, I can tell you with confidence that my entire career has been built around my ability to translate complex topics for general audiences, whether those audiences were my peers, my bosses, our customers and clients, or business school students. I mean, everything I do revolves around that. You’re listening to me talk and communicate right now, right?

And sure, poor communicators can use ChatGPT or Perplexity to draft messages, and those tools ability to do that for you undoubtedly will improve with time. Except… how will poor communicators know if the tool is doing that job well? Judgment matters and judgment requires skill.

To give just one remarkable example for why skill matters, I read a, I’m not going to lie, hilarious thread on BlueSky the other day about a couple of crypto bro wannabes who developed a “sophisticated,” air quotes, a “sophisticated” plan to let ChatGPT draft legal briefs on their behalf in a lawsuit rather than hiring a pricey and in their view, entirely unnecessary lawyer. The lawyer who shared the story on BlueSky noticed that ChatGPT’s legal brief exposed the crypto bros themselves to charges of fraud. The problem with that is their opponents’ lawyers also noticed that. And so did the judge. Whoops.

Now, obviously law and communication aren’t exactly the same thing. But they’re not not the same thing. Writing a legal pleading requires an ability to make a clear point. This one did, just not the one its users realized.

Similar kinds of errors can happen in almost any communication. Your ability to be clear, concise, and, I don’t know, maybe make yourself not look like an idiot or a criminal is best not just left to a bot.

And how you make yourself look good is the third skill you must develop, by which I mean personal branding. I am not a personal branding expert. I’ve spent most of my career focused on digital strategy, particularly in the service of finding and acquiring customers at a reasonable cost, and continually keeping up to date on the best ways to do that as the marketplace changes.

One of the reasons I’m such a big fan of my friend Mark Schaefer’s work is because he is a personal branding expert. I continually learn from his expertise. At the same time, I’m a reasonably well-known person for digital strategy, particularly in service of finding and acquiring customers at a reasonable cost, continually keeping up to date on the best ways to do that as the marketplace changes. People who know me recommend me to their friends and colleagues because they know what I do. They know what our team does. Clients hire me because they know what I can do for them and that I can deliver on what I promise.

None of that is intended as a commercial for my consulting firm. Instead, it’s to highlight how my team and I remain employable by having a clearly defined brand, both for the firm and as individuals ourselves. We know who our customers are and what they need, and we ensure that we maintain a presence that highlights our capabilities and, crucially, that we keep learning too.

Making yourself continually relevant requires that people know what you can do for them. And it requires that they know that you keep yourself relevant. You should want to learn new things for the joy and sheer human pleasure of it. You also want to be sure others are aware that you’re doing that. If your personal brand doesn’t include discussion of your growth as a person, as a leader, and as a professional, you’re hanging a sign that says “We’re closed.” So maybe don’t do that, okay?

Look, I could be wrong about what’s going to happen to marketing and e-commerce in the coming years. Maybe AI will make many more jobs go away than I expect. I don’t think that will happen. In fact, I think we’ll see more jobs in the longer run.

That doesn’t mean that AI won’t cause some short to midterm challenges for some folks. And it certainly can’t stop short-sighted decision makers from cutting workers during any downturns we might see along the way.

The best way to ensure those decisions, good or bad, don’t hurt you is to explore possible scenarios and have a plan for each.

In just about every scenario I’ve looked at, I remain confident that the three things that will help you succeed are adaptability, integration of AI and human skills, and personal branding.

Keep working on those three elements in your career, and I feel pretty good that you’ll land on your feet no matter what happens in the future. I can’t wait to hear what you do.

Show Wrap-up and Credits

Now looking at the clock on the wall, we are very much out of time for this week. I’m willing to bet — and I’m very — hopeful, that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Did someone come to mind? Why not send them a link to the episode? And let them know what you think, too. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 453, and an archive of all our past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. And of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

Finally, thank you so much for listening today. I want you to know this show would not happen without you. We’ll be back with a new episode next week. And until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. We’ll see you soon.

Tim Peter is the founder and president of Tim Peter & Associates. You can learn more about our company's strategy and digital marketing consulting services here or about Tim here.

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