Marketing Jobs of the Future

The marketing industry has been in the doldrums for a couple of years now — senior roles at a premium, junior roles hollowed out, lay-offs here and there. And now Anthropic's latest report claims that 65% of the tasks marketers perform can be replaced by, well, what Anthropic happen to be selling. Go figure. They would say that.

But we think they're probably not wrong. We're in the early stages of an obvious seismic shift, and the early adopters are already all over it. Every seismic shift before this one — the printing press, the Luddites, the automation of the 70s and 80s, the dot com boom — killed off old roles and created new ones. Without people in jobs there's no money to spend on the AI products being built, so the utopian idea that we'll all just have more free time doesn't hold up. There will be jobs. This report is our attempt to futurethink a little: where we're going, what marketing jobs might get created, and what skills they'll need.

Snapshot

If We Don't Have Junior Marketers, Who's Your Next Marketing Manager?

From the job board data we've looked at, entry-level marketing roles have fallen by roughly 14%. It's hard to blame any one company for this — a short-term profitability view will naturally automate as much of the junior, learn-on-the-job work as it can. But if agencies and brands stop hiring entry-level marketers now, the cliff edge arrives in 2029. Who's going to have the critical thinking to spot a campaign that's about to fall flat? Who's going to have the political awareness to manage stakeholders ahead of a product launch?

We see three possible answers. First, AI apprenticeships: the opportunity may shift to analysing AI output, learning to spot its mistakes, and understanding why a senior strategist edited what they edited — not just the output, but the input and what makes it work. Second, superagency: smart young marketers who use AI to elevate themselves above their peers could accelerate their careers faster than ever — someone who can orchestrate, critique and refine campaign strategy from a solid degree-level foundation is worth more than a junior who can simply write copy. Third, the long-term view — IBM has said it will triple entry-level hiring because it has worked out what jobs it will need and what pipeline to build. Larger organisations may prove more nimble here, and could end up supplying the pipeline that smaller brands and agencies poach from.

Don't Compete With AI on AI's Terms

Our advice to aspiring marketers is simple: don't compete with AI on AI's terms. Being solely a great copywriter isn't enough any more. Being a whizz at social media isn't enough. What's scarce, and therefore valuable, is being the great copywriter who can scale and improve quality using AI — bringing human judgement, critical thinking and taste to the process.

• Develop the human skills. University professors are reportedly tearing their hair out at how much ChatGPT usage is eroding critical thinking in their students. While others build a reliance on it, there's an edge in retaining the old skills, building the foundation, and being the hire who's enabled by AI rather than led by it.
• Develop the judgement. Degrees are stuck in 2018, and it was entry-level roles that used to build judgement over time. That same judgement is now what's needed to pilot AI, assess whether it's actually benefiting the business, and build storytelling on top of what it produces.
• Be the shaper of AI content. Early ChatGPT adopters simply asked it to do their homework and handed it in untouched. The truly AI-enabled hires of the future will be the ones who can shape the content it produces — using it to research, structure, educate and build content that actually engages an audience. AI fluency plus critical thinking is the edge.

Marketing Jobs of the Future

We're not Nostradamus, but we're relative optimists, and we think AI is opening up a raft of new opportunities for marketers in orchestration, strategy, analysis and agentic AI management. There will also always be a place for traditional marketing roles like the product marketer and the demand generation specialist — arguably more so, as new products need audiences found, understood and targeted appropriately. Here are the ten roles we think are coming.

• The AI Marketing Orchestrator (Martech)
• Brand Guardian & AI Quality Director
• AI Creative Director / Prompt Strategist
• Insight Storyteller / Data Translator
• Customer Experience Architect
• AI Ethics & Compliance Lead
• Relationship Strategist
• Marketing AI Engineer
• Conversion Scientist
• Chief AI Revenue Officer (CAIRO)

1. The AI Marketing Orchestrator (Martech)

This is the conductor of the AI marketing symphony — much like a MarTech professional today, but with a wider remit. This person designs the AI marketing tech stack: which tools get deployed for what, how those tools interconnect, how agents operate them on users' behalf, and how the outputs flow into a coherent marketing operation. Like Marketing Ops professionals, they're systems thinkers, focused on the workflows between humans and tech, tech and tech, and humans and humans — knitting together systems that don't naturally speak to each other and improving adoption.

Likely pathways in: Marketing Operations Manager, MarTech Manager, Marketing Automation Specialist, CRM Manager.

• Designing and maintaining the AI martech stack
• Creating workflows that chain multiple AI tools into pipelines
• Evaluating new AI tools and determining where they fit
• Setting quality benchmarks and monitoring AI output across all channels
• Translating marketing strategy into AI-executable processes

2. Brand Guardian & AI Quality Director

As AI produces an ever-increasing volume of marketing content, the need for someone to act as brand guardian — protecting consistency and quality — only grows. This is the human firewall between AI output and the public: the person, or team leader, who develops brand voice guidelines for AI to follow, builds the frameworks, and makes the nuanced judgement calls that AI can't. We're already seeing versions of this role in AI-focused startups, typically under titles like Content Strategist, Brand Manager or Head of Content.

This role will matter most to organisations that are strongly brand-led and protective of their brand, and will demand a sizeable degree of measurement.

• Developing AI-readable brand guidelines and voice documentation
• Creating and maintaining quality assurance frameworks for AI-generated content
• Making editorial judgment calls on tone, sensitivity, and cultural appropriateness
• Training and fine-tuning AI models on brand-specific language and style
• Auditing AI outputs for accuracy, bias, and brand alignment

3. AI Creative Director / Prompt Strategist

This is what happens when today's Creative Director gets fully enabled by AI — architecting creative systems rather than individual assets. That means developing prompt libraries, building reusable frameworks that consistently generate on-brand, high-quality creative, and understanding how far AI tools can be pushed to produce work that actually surprises and engages customers. Think of the difference between someone who can operate a camera and a cinematographer — same tools, worlds apart in vision and craft. Likely pathways: Creative Director, Head of Creative, Content Strategist, Campaigns Manager.

• Building and curating prompt libraries for different campaign types and brand voices
• Designing creative briefs that translate human strategy into AI-executable creative direction
• Testing and iterating on prompt architectures for maximum creative quality
• Pushing the boundaries of what AI-assisted creativity can achieve

4. Insight Storyteller / Data Translator

Storyteller can be a bit of a buzzword, but every good marketer is one deep down. We rate this role highly because AI is extremely good at analysing data at speed and scale, but it can't tell a compelling story to a boardroom, and it can't read the sensitivities and political dynamics in the room, or work out which insight will actually change someone's mind. This is the person who takes the torrent of AI-generated data and analytics and turns it into a narrative that drives action. Likely pathways: Marketing Analyst (e.g. PPC analyst), Consumer Insights Manager, Account Managers/Directors.

• Interpreting AI-generated analytics and identifying the stories within the data
• Creating compelling presentations that translate AI insights into business cases
• Building dashboards and reports that make AI-generated insights accessible to non-technical stakeholders
• Connecting data patterns to customer psychology and market dynamics
• Advising senior leadership on strategic implications of AI-surfaced trends

5. Customer Experience Architect

We talk a lot about "human in the loop" with AI — but no human in that loop matters more than the customer. If AI is enabling hyper-personalisation at scale, someone has to think about the whole customer journey, not just individual touchpoints, and design how AI personalisation, human interaction and automated processes come together without pulling apart, while keeping the experience personal. At heart this is a design role, built on a deep understanding of AI capabilities, customer psychology, and an instinct for exactly when a human needs to step into the loop. Likely pathways: Customer Experience Manager, Customer Journey Manager, Lifecycle Marketing Manager, CRM Strategist, UX Strategist.

• Mapping end-to-end customer journeys that blend AI and human touchpoints
• Designing personalisation strategies and defining the rules for AI-driven customisation
• Identifying moments where human intervention adds irreplaceable value
• Testing and optimising the balance between automation and authenticity
• Collaborating with product, UX, and data teams to implement experience designs

6. AI Ethics & Compliance Lead (Marketing)

Part lawyer, part philosopher, part marketer, this role could grow in importance as regulation eventually catches up with the technology — if it ever does. Ethical and legal complexity will only multiply as AI becomes more central to marketing and humans lean on it more to produce creative: misleading claims generated by AI, discriminatory targeting, unclear transparency obligations. It's an entirely new role, so the pathways in are less obvious, but we could see it drawn from Marketing Compliance Officers, people who've studied ethics within marketing, or data privacy and GDPR specialists.

• Developing ethical guidelines for AI use in marketing campaigns
• Ensuring compliance with AI-specific regulations (EU AI Act, ASA guidelines, etc.)
• Auditing AI systems for bias, discrimination, and misleading outputs
• Creating transparency frameworks for AI-generated content and interactions
• Training marketing teams on responsible AI use

7. Relationship Strategist

There's a good argument that the flood of AI-generated content in your inbox right now is putting you off replying to any of it. We toyed with calling this the Human Connection Strategist — at its heart, it's the person who focuses on everything AI can't do: building relationships, building community, running events, delivering experiences. Perhaps not an entirely new role, but a more refined and more strategic one. The pathways here feel obvious: events managers, community managers, PR and communications managers, influencer/creative partnerships managers, brand partnerships leads.

• Designing community-building strategies that create genuine belonging
• Managing ambassador and advocacy programmes with real human relationships
• Creating live experiences, events, and moments that cannot be replicated digitally
• Developing influencer and creator partnerships based on authentic alignment
• Identifying and protecting the customer touchpoints where human interaction is irreplaceable

8. Marketing AI Engineer

This could turn out to be one of the highest-paid individual contributor roles in the new landscape — a technical marketer bridging strategy and technical implementation. That's not just deploying off-the-shelf AI tools, but building custom solutions, integrating APIs, building data pipelines and developing technical infrastructure — a little like the Martech Orchestrator, but further into the weeds. Pathways could come from Marketing Technologist, Growth Engineer, Data Engineer, or even full-stack developers moving in from outside marketing altogether.

• Building custom AI solutions for marketing-specific use cases
• Integrating AI tools into existing marketing technology stacks via APIs
• Developing proprietary data pipelines and machine learning models
• Creating automated workflows that connect strategy to execution
• Evaluating and implementing emerging AI technologies for marketing advantage

9. Conversion Scientist

Likely the evolved version of today's Conversion Rate Optimisation Specialist — but running at roughly ten times the speed and scale. This person uses AI to run experimentation at a much larger scale, designing, running and interpreting rapid experiments across every customer touchpoint, and using AI to generate variants, analyse results and spot patterns human analysis might miss. Would pair well with the Insight Storyteller. As an evolved role, the pathways are more obvious: CRO Specialist, Marketing Analyst, Growth Marketer, Performance Marketing Manager.

• Designing experimentation frameworks that leverage AI for rapid hypothesis generation
• Running multi-variant tests across channels, content, and customer segments simultaneously
• Interpreting AI-analysed test results and extracting actionable insights
• Building a culture of evidence-based decision-making within marketing teams
• Identifying non-obvious optimisation opportunities through AI pattern recognition

10. Chief AI Revenue Officer (CAIRO)

Who wouldn't want to be called a CAIRO? This is most likely the evolution of the Chief Revenue Officer role, or a slightly more downstream RevOps title — someone responsible for AI-driven revenue strategy, bridging what's theoretical about AI and what the business is actually achieving from it. As with the Conversion Scientist, this is an evolved role, so the pathways are clearer: Director of RevOps, CMO, Marketing Director, VP of Growth, Chief Revenue Officer.

• Setting the AI-driven revenue strategy for the organisation
• Building and leading the new-model marketing team
• Making investment decisions about AI tools, talent, and infrastructure
• Reporting to the board on AI-driven marketing performance and ROI
• Defining the ethical and strategic boundaries for AI use in revenue generation

The Pathways Are There. Who's Coming?

The advent of the internet could have ended media buying. It didn't — it created a whole new ecosystem of roles nobody could have imagined at the time. That's our best hope for a repeat here.

The dot com boom taught us we're very poor at imagining what comes next. Who would have predicted performance marketing, social media managers or influencers? We should hope this is a similar inflection point. Right now the pain is being felt mostly at the junior end of the market, and as an industry we need to act to preserve the mid-level marketers we'll need in years to come.

“When there are no jobs, there are revolutions. If people don't work, who's going to buy these AI products?”

Sam Altman, the ultimate utopian, believes we'll all have lots more free time to do "nice things." More likely, we'll adapt, rearrange ourselves, and keep finding new ways to compete. You could argue — and we will — that AI lowers the barriers to marketing activity, meaning more businesses, particularly smaller ones, can run more sophisticated marketing for the first time. They'll still need strategic guidance even where execution is automated. You could also argue AI opens up new marketing channels and formats that need new expertise to exploit, and that the volume of touchpoints, data sources and personalisation possibilities is exploding — which means more orchestration, more strategy and greater oversight are needed, not less.

So consider us relative optimists. We're not alone in that: the World Economic Forum forecasts 40% growth in AI-related marketing roles within the next five years. And the people who carve out a position in these roles soonest stand to earn the most.