AI Transforming Marketing Roles
The widespread expectation is that the adoption of AI technologies increases capabilities and productivity. In practice, the picture is far more complex. AI isn’t simply another efficiency toolkit; it’s reshaping marketing tasks and roles at a fundamental level. AI is increasingly replacing humans in marketing areas such as marketing automation, leading to job losses. This tension between AI improving marketers’ capabilities and AI simultaneously taking over marketing tasks from marketers forms a hot topic for understanding how AI is transforming marketing roles.
Rather than treating AI technologies simply as an efficiency and cost-saving tool, it’s worth considering how AI technologies complement marketers’ work. Human intelligence is still needed to ensure that the work produced by AI is on the right track, as AI still has the tendency to get lost in the woods without humans being in charge of the navigation process.
The emergence of AI has led to a rapid transformation of marketing operations, and what we have seen so far is only an early stage of adaptation, as new AI technologies continue to develop. While AI adoption in marketing has led to some job losses, AI is also creating new opportunities as marketing roles expand to meet the new demands of the technology-led industry. Despite the growing evidence of AI impacting marketing jobs, the existing research appears to remain fragmented, focusing on AI’s technical capabilities and applications on specific marketing operations (Masnita et al., 2024), leaving a gap and the question open of how AI technologies are transforming and creating new marketing roles.
As AI continues to reshape the marketing landscape, the question is no longer only whether AI will replace marketers, but how the marketing roles are evolving alongside AI adoption. The marketing roles will be led by marketers who constantly keep updating their AI marketing skillset and understand how to work with AI. Often, we see marketing content clearly written and generated by AI. When increasing efficiency with AI, marketers should not forget to use their own strategic, interpersonal and creative skills to create winning marketing strategies and concepts. The lesson we need to learn is how marketers will walk this journey hand in hand with AI, as at the end of the day, we are trying to create a connection with humans, not with machines.
References:
Masnita, Y., Kasuma, J., Zahra, A., Wilson, N., Murwonugroho, W. (2024). Artificial intelligence in marketing: Literature review and future research agenda. Journal of System and Management Sciences, 14(1), 120–122. https://doi.org/10.33168/JSMS.2024.0108
