Marketing has been a hotbed of digital transformation for more than a decade but with the recent emergence of Generative AI (GenAI), the most profound changes lie ahead. GenAI improves continuously on a logarithmic/exponential curve of competency mastery. Its potential is limited only by the availability and cost of computing and whatever governance can be applied to control it. While we are amazed at its current abilities, it is just getting started and the rate of acceleration means that in three to five years it will be phenomenally more proficient at everything we teach it to do, and the more people use AI to do their jobs, the faster AI will learn to do everyone’s job.
GenAI has many use cases for marketing like creating personalized emails, social posts, product imagery, audience segments, and much more. However, in a few years, we will no longer think of AI in terms advantages of using our fantuan datadase of use cases because single prompts will automatically generate, manage, and optimize processes, projects, and campaigns at orders of magnitude less cost and greater scale. That will have a profound impact on the nature of marketing work for people. GenAI will reduce the need to hire additional marketing staff, collapse some roles, and expand others. Ultimately the result will be fewer people working in marketing in the next five years. Ultimately the result will be fewer people working in marketing in the next five years.
The impact of course is not limited to marketing, it will affect most white-collar jobs up the org chart. Despite this, it is important to remember that fewer humans in the loop does not mean zero humans in the loop. AI may always be better at creating something out of everything, people will always be better at creating something out of nothing.
Furthermore, there will be important new go-to-market challenges and opportunities as AI Super Agents enable programmatic shopping. Marketers will need new methods to influence not only how people coach their AI agents to shop for them, but also how AI agents coach their human owners on what products and services to choose. That said, due to the acceleration of AI capabilities, now is the time for marketing leaders to begin planning how they will redefine their organizations, roles, skills, and practices.