Adobe rejects job loss AI theory, says marketers must lead transformation
Adobe ANZ MD Katrina Troughton has rejected the notion that AI will drive job losses in marketing teams and urged marketers to take a more active role in leading the AI adoption.
Speaking to Mumbrella at Adobe’s Summit yesterday, Troughton said that despite growing interest, many marketers remain hesitant about where to begin.
“It’s hard because it can be a bit sort of scary and daunting, but I think the opportunity to think about doing some training, start trying some things even in the tools you have today. You know, that’s the first step.”
She said AI implementation should be tailored to the marketer’s role and urged practitioners to engage with the tools already at their disposal.
“Start adopting it, start thinking about it, because the more you understand what its capability is, the more you can think about what you bring to that and how you can expand your role.”
She doesn’t believe agentic AI will lead to job losses.
“I think the opportunity of marketing is, how can I continue to drive productivity?”
She recommended that marketers not approach AI in isolation, but as a driver of organisational change.
“Finding a few people across silos that you can help them as a result, help make their outcomes more successful, make them more productive, make them be able to remove some of the things they don’t like doing … they can really become part of the change agents that you need, I think, to support you as you as you want, to change not just what you’re doing, but change what your organisation’s doing.”
She also noted an emerging trend of organisations creating new leadership roles focused on AI.
“Having the one person who is helping to bring all those parties together, helping lead the collaboration … can help break down some of the silos and bring people together.”
That leadership, she stressed, requires broad capability rather than deep specialisation.
“You can’t be the technical expert and the marketing expert and the legal expert … so it’s as much about how you bring that together, how you talk to having your policies, your guidelines in place, and really then enabling people to go be successful.”
Katrina Troughton
Data governance, she added, should begin with the customer rather than legislation. “The most important thing for all of us as marketers is to be able to retain trust of our customers. And I think that’s a higher bar.”
Troughton also pointed to Adobe’s support for the Content Authenticity Initiative, a cross-industry global project that aims to create open standards for disclosure and attribution in creative work, as a step toward more transparent content production, and said that the adoption of the protocol had been successful.
“It might have been something we originated, but it’s an open and separate organisation that now has many members… they are now looking at how you can start deriving standards from that.” She said such standards could offer a path to consistent, self-regulated transparency, reducing the need for reactive enforcement.
“We’d all like to see that self regulation working as the first, but I do think government absolutely has a part to play in that.”
She also highlighted the learning curve facing many in the industry, and stressed that progress doesn’t require perfection. “If you get in early, if you learn, it doesn’t take you long to be the expert … you don’t have to know a lot more than the people two days behind you in the training.”
This can’t and won’t be stopped. And it will enable all sorts of people to do amazing things creatively. Fine. But lets not pretend the shift won’t lead to job losses and devastated careers for many in our industry.
Sorrel was just on stage explaining how they can now make video ads for £100K that previously cost £1M.
A generated spoof medical ad made by a medical ads professional went viral on LinkedIn the other month. He claimed it had cost $500 worth of Veo3 use, compared to the $500K it would have cost to actually shoot such an ad.
All the people who were needed to make ads the old way, from the talent agency to the caterer and camera people will no longer be needed. One can make a long list of roles no longer needed. Technically, they probably aren’t included in the “marketing teams” Katrina Troughton is talking about, but they are certainly part of our industry and they will lose their jobs.
And there will be flow on effects. A large part of the creative industries of Australia exist because many of the people in it can get side income from the marketing industry.
User ID not verified.
We need a revolution and soon
User ID not verified.
Have your say