The AI Debate in Marketing Is Missing the Point

We’ve all heard (and frankly are a little tired) of the conversation around AI and content. Yes, we can all spot what’s written by AI, yes the new ChatGPT tool can create cool images, and yes, an em-dash is a telltale sign of AI use. 

But when we look at AI within marketing, content is just the surface.

Over the past month I’ve sat down with marketing leaders across agencies and fast-scaling companies in the Randstad. I mainly spoke with founders, CEOs, and marketing managers who are trying to figure out what AI means for their teams. I asked each of them the same question: What is AI actually changing? The interesting thing is: none of them were talking about content or specific tools. All of them were talking about something far more fundamental: 

What kind of people does a marketing team actually need right now, and where do we find them?

Daniel (ClickValue) phrased it best: “You can compare marketing to F1. Everyone is driving almost the same car now. The technology is the same. The tools are available to everyone. The difference is the team behind it."

The repetitive work is gone. That's not the story.

Let's get the obvious part out of the way quickly, because yes, a lot of marketing work is being automated. And frankly, it’s amazing what it can do for you. 

Repetitive production work is being automated. Jason (Neosem) described what that looks like in practice at his agency: “We have two guys that are fully on AI. Forty hours a week, purely focused on automation, tooling, and reporting.” With a team of roughly fifty people, this is obviously a structural decision. And one I’m seeing across many marketing agencies in the space. Teams are running months of trial programs to see where AI can create meaningful impact. What can be handed off, and most importantly, what tasks still need human judgment. One interesting thing is that almost everyone I spoke to actually saw AI being far stronger on the performance side of marketing (pattern recognition, data reporting, analyzing at scale). On the content side, despite all of the public debate, it’s a lot weaker than most people think. The main problem is that AI can’t produce anything new. Original thinking, real research, authentic perspective. These things remain human territory. 

So yes, the repetitive work is gone. The question is what this actually means for the people you hire.

The specialist is becoming a liability.

This is where it gets counterintuitive, and where it starts going against what most companies are actually doing when they hire. 

Many founders instinctively want to focus more and more on specialization. They want to hire AI specialists, performance specialists, and go deeper on the channels that work. What continuously came up in the conversations I’ve had actually pointed in the opposite direction. The person who goes all-in on one lane and cannot work across disciplines is increasingly the highest-risk hire you can make.

A few things point to this. One CEO of a digital marketing agency argued that a single AI specialist creates a very fragile environment. “If they leave, everything they built goes with them and nobody else understands how it works”. This is a relatively straightforward argument. But if you look at it on a deeper level, marketing decisions no longer live inside a single channel. They become a combination of technology, data, strategy, and customer understanding. On top of that, even on the marketing side alone, all marketing channels start to become much more dependent on each other. More touchpoints are generally needed to convert people, across multiple platforms. So hiring for someone that not only understands all aspects, but lives inside all of them is becoming an increasingly strong bet. 

What the market has rewarded for the past decade is depth. What is starting to matter most across all sectors is business understanding and the ability to move across disciplines. Those things are also, not coincidentally, the hardest to screen for when you're looking at CVs, which makes hiring even more complicated.

AI hasn't devalued marketing. It's squeezed out the middle.

There is a theme underneath all of this that is worth naming. AI has simultaneously made marketing easier and harder to do well.

Eleni (Dapper) named the uncomfortable side of this most directly.  "AI has kind of backfired on the industry. Now anybody with five minutes and a chatbot thinks they can do marketing because they can have it write some posts and create a visual." She's right. The floor has gone up. Generic marketing is free now. You can't compete at that level anymore because you can't undercut free. But here's the thing. That same dynamic hasn't made serious marketing less valuable. If anything, it's made it more valuable, because the gap between the free stuff and the real stuff is now extremely obvious. 

Eelco (Digital Growth Agency) made the financial argument: "You still need to be distinctive. If your competitors are spending on marketing and building a distinctive story, you have to do the same. Otherwise you fall behind." He hasn't seen a single client cut their marketing budget. The money doesn't disappear when AI reduces your production costs. It moves toward the things AI can't do. The content that actually builds a brand rather than just filling a content calendar.

The beautiful thing about this is that the middle is disappearing. The competent but forgettable. The technically fine but interchangeable. That's getting replaced by AI-generated output that costs nothing. What survives on the other side is the work that is actually worth something, and the work we all love. 

I’ve seen this hitting in-house teams harder than agencies. Agencies can free up the time to think at a high level about where things are going. That has been, and will always be part of their job. In-house marketing teams are juggling product launches, sales support, campaigns, and five other things at once. Finding the space to rethink how the whole function works is extremely hard when you're also just trying to get through the week.

What we heard from in-house leaders, including Wolter Rebergen at WebinarGeek, is that this isn't really a question of roles disappearing. It's a question of roles changing. What WebinarGeek is hiring for now looks completely different from what they would have hired a few years ago. There is less emphasis on specific channels, and a lot more emphasis on business context. People who understand how marketing connects to the rest of the company. People who can figure out new tools rather than being handed a playbook. They're actively hiring for it, including someone whose job is to connect AI to how the rest of the team actually works.

Don’t get me wrong. You still need the technical skills to get in the door. But that alone does not determine whether you last anymore.

The question nobody is asking.

Everything above points in the same direction: Marketing teams need strategists who are able to understand business context, adapt quickly to all the new tools being implemented, and work across different disciplines. I think there is a general consensus of what good looks like. However, nobody has a clear answer on how you build your team around it. Especially the new generation of marketers. 

Because the senior marketers of today learned by doing the boring stuff.

They started junior. They ran campaigns that probably didn't work. They pulled reports nobody read. They wrote blog posts for keywords that never ranked. They made small mistakes on low-stakes work, over and over, until they understood how things actually work. Over their first few years, they built the instincts that became useful later.

AI has automated most of that work. The entry-level job as it existed made sense because the work was needed, and the learning was embedded in doing it. That's gone now. One person we spoke to said they genuinely can't picture what a junior marketing job looks like anymore. Not because junior marketers aren't needed. But because the work that used to fill that role, and more importantly teach it, has largely disappeared. Nobody has figured out what replaces it.

This is a much bigger problem than it looks. The junior problem, frankly, is a senior problem with a 10-year delay. The way experienced marketing talent is being produced is slowly becoming more and more vague. And there’s a good chance the consequences won’t show up until it’s already too late to fix quickly.

So where does that leave us?

Everyone is focused on the tools. What gets automated, what gets replaced, what gets produced faster. That's a good conversation to have. But it's only half of it.

Underneath all of it is a people question. What does marketing actually require from someone now? How do you find that person? How do you develop them? Those questions take longer to answer and they don't make for good LinkedIn posts. But they are the questions worth asking. 

The companies that come out of this period with a real advantage won't be the ones with the best subscriptions. They'll be the ones that figured out earlier than everyone else what marketing actually requires from people now, and built their hiring and development around that. 

Most companies are not thinking about this seriously yet. The ones that do, now, are building an advantage that will be very hard to close later.

We're going to keep pulling on this. Next piece will go deeper into what companies are actually doing, and what the profession looks like if nobody solves the junior problem in time.