Marketing’s Bottom Rung Is Being Automated Away. The Long-Term Cost Could Be Huge
The roles that once taught judgment, critical thinking, and decision-making are becoming harder to find.
EXPERT OPINION BY ROBERT GILLESPIE, AI MARKETING EXPERT
The American Marketing Association’s new 2026 State of Marketing Careers Report contains one line every business leader should read twice: “Companies are not hiring less judgment. They are hiring less execution.”
In the short term, that sounds like progress, and it is.
AI now handles a growing share of the routine work that used to take up a marketer’s week, pulling the weekly report, gathering the data, monitoring campaigns, drafting the first version of everything.
The report also found that the share of marketing job postings mentioning AI nearly doubled in a single year, from 8 percent last January to 15 percent by December. At the same time, employers are increasingly wanting people who can direct the technology, not people who do the tasks it now automates.
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But the real problem sits one level further down, in the very work AI is now taking off everyone’s plate, and it’s the kind of thing you only notice once it has already cost you.
The layer that’s being automated away
Think about how a marketer actually becomes good at marketing. They spend a few years on the unglamorous work, building the reports, writing the drafts nobody sees, chasing the campaign details, running the research.
That work is tedious, but it’s also where good marketing judgment gets built. You learn what a good number looks like by producing a thousand ordinary ones. You learn to spot a weak headline by writing plenty of them.
Source: www.inc.com
