AI isn’t coming for your job — it’s already here
The media and marketing industry is being reshaped as employers gamble on AI’s future capabilities, hoping to bridge the gap between economic pressures and the promise of AI tools.
There is a discomfitting level of denial within the creative industries. AI is taking jobs. This isn’t a near-future threat; it’s a present-day reality, and our industry needs to acknowledge this, individually and collectively.
It’s time to ask your leadership teams what their plans are; to ask our industry bodies for their stance. It’s time for a reality check.
At time of writing, AI tools can complete many marketing functions to an average human standard. In the very near term, we’ll see highly specialised AI agents capable of performing complex, multi-step marketing tasks, solving problems and completing jobs autonomously.
While AI tools are not yet a one-to-one replacement for skilled marketing professionals, the anticipation of these capabilities is already reshaping the job market. Employers are preemptively reducing headcounts, banking on AI tools to perform critical functions at a fraction of the human cost. Budget-conscious leaders – often pushed to reduce spend rather than increase revenue – are betting on AI to perform “well enough” to justify reducing staff numbers.
Some of the seeds of this disruption were planted during the pandemic, when we began to understand that the way we work could be radically reshaped. Redundancies are widespread; vacancies aren’t being refilled.
This preemptive downsizing is compounding an already challenging employment environment, leading to a pressure cooker effect. Professionals feel the need to overperform to secure their positions, with enormous ramifications for talent, for knowledge sharing, for career progression, and perhaps even the future of work.
The robots are here
In 2023, I spoke to an agency head who told me that their team was using AI to claw back a 50-hour work week, rather than a 70-plus hour one. “But my clients have said they know we’re using AI, and they expect to start seeing those savings being passed back,” they reflected. The early promise of AI was to be able to do hitherto unimaginable things. But the direction of travel seems to be to increase the pressure to do more, and more (and more) of the same, with fewer and fewer people.
The research we carried out for humAIn with Time Under Tension revealed that 16% of organisations had already decreased headcount due to AI usage. Microsoft announced this week that it has axed 3% of its global workforce to focus on AI investment, with analysts predicting further cuts. Shopify’s CEO, Tobias Lütke, recently announced that his staff must prove that an AI can’t handle a task before requesting budget for new human hires. Companies like IBM and CrowdStrike have already made significant job cuts.
Tech leaders like Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg have been famously disparaging about advertising, with Altman predicting in 2024 that 95% of agency, strategy and creative roles will soon be handled by AI, and Zuckerberg announcing the death of advertising agencies in a recent interview. Zuck’s vision is a Meta AI stack that handles everything from content creation to targeting, an “infinite creative” model where brands input objectives and AI delivers, leaving the rest of us free to scroll endlessly through a digital landscape of AI slop.
Depending on who you ask, AGI – artificial general intelligence – is predicted to arrive somewhere between 2027 and 2060. AGI represents an AI that can perform any computer-based task to an advanced human level, without specialised training. We have no road map and no plan in place to help us imagine what impact this might have, and it’s past time we began to have those conversations.
The lack of clarity is exacerbated by a significant gap in organisational readiness and guidance. The humAIn research also showed that while individuals are increasingly using AI tools on their own (at double the rate of use in 2024), only one in five organisations offer training or tools. This heightens the risk of data breaches and inconsistent quality, and, combined with stressed-out staff, creates an environment where mistakes are more likely, jeopardising brand safety and customer relationships.
If you’re in a marketing team, now is the time to push for guidance and training. If you’re leading one, it’s time to reassess your talent strategy.
Everyone is already using AI
We need to retire the phrase “AI won’t take your job. Someone using AI might,” because everyone is already using AI, through browsers, inboxes, and tech stacks. I’d like to say that the way you use AI will become the critical differentiator, along with your invaluably human skills: creativity, empathy, insight.
But it’s also time to say the quiet part out loud: the industry will shrink. Hybrid human-AI teams will become the norm. It may be that the quality of output will be worse, for what I hope is a short period – before the pendulum swings back toward craft and creative excellence. But once we lose our senior talent, who will step in to replace them? Who will train our juniors? Who will oversee the AI agents?
Artificial intelligence holds infinite possibilities. It’s helped me reclaim time from tedious tasks and also acts as a thought partner; the idea for this piece came from a robust discussion I had with an AI chatbot while walking my dog. The chatbot insisted that those media and marketing professionals whose jobs were disrupted by AI could retrain as AI ethicists.
Putting aside the question of whether ethics has ever truly found a home inside an ad agency, the reality is this: there will be fewer roles.
How many AI ethicists does it take to change a culture?
Keep up to date with the latest in media and marketing
Well, I wonder who wrote the article if AI was already done the job?
User ID not verified.