AI is changing marketing careers by automating junior tasks. Learn how early-career marketers can build judgement, strategy and expertise in the age of AI.
AI can already write the copy, analyse the data and suggest the strategy. So if you’re at the beginning of your marketing career, how exactly are you supposed to learn?
Dear Amelia,
I’m 25 and I’m starting to think ChatGPT is coming for me.
I’m only in my second marketing job, but more and more of the work I used to do is being handed over to AI.
Copy? AI. Campaign ideas? AI. Research, reports and presentations? Also AI.
My boss thinks this is fantastic because apparently it means I can spend less time doing boring junior work and more time doing “strategic thinking”.
But the problem is that I’m a junior. I don’t know how to do the strategic thinking yet.
Surely I’m supposed to learn that by doing all the boring stuff first? AI can already do about half my job and, frankly, it seems to be learning faster than I am.
Am I screwed?
Best, Soon-To-Be-Obsolete?
Dear Soon-To-Be-Obsolete,
Short answer: no. Slightly more irritating answer: you may have to get very good, very quickly, at the bits ChatGPT can’t do.
I recently spent a day at MeasureCamp surrounded by analytics, data, and digital people talking about AI, automation, and what happens to our jobs next.
One idea kept coming up. AI will increasingly do more of the execution, while humans move towards strategy, judgement and decision-making.
Lovely. There is just one tiny flaw in this plan: where exactly is all that judgement
supposed to come from?
Nobody is born knowing what “good” looks like
When you’ve been doing something for years, it’s easy to forget how much of what you
know came from being fairly bad at it first. You wrote the rubbish campaign. You pulled the wrong numbers. You presented something to a senior person who immediately asked the one painfully obvious question you hadn’t considered.
Some things worked. Other things landed with all the grace of a piano being pushed
down a staircase. That’s how judgement develops.
Nobody graduates at 22 with “commercial instinct” and “strategic thinking”
mysteriously installed like the latest iOS update. You develop those things by doing the work, getting bits of it wrong and doing it again.
Which is why I think there’s a genuine problem hiding inside all the excitement about AI.
AI might steal your practice
Take copywriting for example. If you spent your first few years writing hundreds of
headlines, emails and ads, eventually you’d develop an instinct for what worked. You’d
learn why one sentence felt flat and another one landed.
Now you can ask AI for 20 headlines and have them done before you’ve finished your
coffee.
That’s brilliant, but there’s a catch. If you never struggled through writing the first 500
yourself, how good are you at deciding which of those 20 is actually any good?
The danger isn’t simply that AI steals your job. It’s that it steals your practice.
“The robot said so” is not a strategy
Another idea I heard at MeasureCamp was that AI-powered work may increasingly
operate as a chain. This means an AI agent will complete task 1, then a review agent
checks task 1, while being overseen by human 1. Human 1 approves the work, which
then gets passed to AI agent 2. And so on.
That sounds plausible to me. Humans are still very much in the picture. But look closely at what the human is being asked to do. They’re not necessarily producing the first draft anymore. They’re being asked to know whether the first draft is right.
AI is already extremely good at producing things that look convincing. Sometimes, those outputs are excellent. Sometimes they’re complete nonsense delivered with absolute confidence.
You need to know the difference, because “AI seemed pretty sure” is probably not going to satisfy the CEO.
Don’t passively consume AI output; interrogate it
If I were 25 and building a marketing career now, I would absolutely use AI. I mean, I
would be all over it. You don’t get bonus points in life for spending four hours doing
something a machine can help you do in ten minutes.
But one thing I wouldn’t let it do is replace my thinking.
If it gives you a campaign plan, interrogate it. Why that audience? Why that channel?
What assumptions is it making?
If it analyses some data, look at the numbers yourself. If it writes the copy, work out
what you’d change. If it gives you an answer, make sure you could explain that answer
without beginning with, “Well, ChatGPT said…”
Your job isn’t to prove you can produce everything manually. It’s to build enough
knowledge to recognise when AI has produced something excellent, something
mediocre or something completely bonkers.
Your boss has a problem too
Employers need to think about this as well.
Companies can’t automate away all the junior work, then wake up five years later
wondering why there aren’t enough experienced marketers.
A lot of repetitive junior work has always had a second purpose: it trains people. So if
some of that work disappears, managers will need to become much more deliberate
about development. If AI produces the analysis, the junior marketer still needs to
understand how it got there. If AI drafts the campaign, the junior needs to know enough to understand how to critique it.
The learning can’t disappear just because the task has been automated.
And there is some good news
Nobody expects you to know everything at 25. They expect you to learn. And you now
have access to a tool that previous generations of junior marketers could only have
dreamed about. You can ask it to explain something ten different ways, challenge your
thinking, give you examples, and help you explore subjects you don’t understand.
Used properly, AI could actually help you become better faster.
So, Soon-To-Be-Obsolete, no. I don’t think you’re screwed.
But your career may develop differently from the careers of marketers ten or twenty
years ahead of you. You’ll probably do less grunt work, you may need to exercise
judgement earlier, and you’ll have to be more deliberate about building expertise.
Use the machines. Learn from them. Argue with them when they’re wrong.
Just don’t let them have the interesting bit between your ears.
Got a question for an upcoming #AskAmelia?
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