68: How fast could AI change or replace marketing jobs?

What’s up JT, good to chat again. When you aren’t podcasting or consulting, what are you reading or listening to these days?

Yeah I’ve been BUSY. Bobiverse books, of course but also lots of Mario with my kids – haha, my downtime totally spent on guilty pleasures.

Haha yeah you had a head start on Bobiverse but I overlapped you… that’s probably going to change soon for me… I don’t think I’ve announced this on the cast yet but my wife and I are on baby watch, first born arriving at any second now which s why we need to record a few episodes haha

I’ve actually been getting back into podcasts lately. Maybe I’ll plug a few of my favorites ahead of our next episodes. I’ve really been digging Making Sense of Martech lately. Juan Mendoza is the guy behind the podcast, he’s a friend of the show and he’s been doubling down on it, pumping out weekly episodes. If you want to go deep on some technical topics, in episode 37 he had the CEO of Hightouch Data on and he debates the merits of reverse ETL and they really unpack CDPs. Check it out.

In the non marketing podcast world I’ve been taking a dive into the world of AI. No, not fluffy my top 10 ChatGPT prompts and buy my course type of content, way darker shit, like will marketing be replaced by AI in 10 or 20 years… sooner? 

My buddy Alex recommended The Ezra Klein Show. The episode is titled Freaked Out? We Really Can Prepare for A.I. On the show he has Kelsey Piper, a senior writer at Vox. She basically spends her time writing and being ahead of the curve covering advanced A.I.

In that episode she says something like: “The AI community believes that we are 5-10 years away from systems that can do any job you can do remotely. Anything you can do on your computer.”

Recently Goldman Sachs released a report saying AI could replace the equivalent of 300 million jobs. 

A day later Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, Wozniak and several other tech leaders wrote an open letter urging a pause in AI development, citing profound risks. 

So I went down a rabbit hole and it really prompted the next 4 episodes

1. How fast could AI change or replace marketing jobs?
2. How marketers can stay informed and become AI fluent
3. Navigating through AI in your marketing career
4. Find the top AI marketing tools and filter out the noise

So basically

1. How soon and how significantly will this impact my job

2. How do I keep up with changes?

3. Is it possible to adapt? How can I future-proof myself?

4. How can I start right freaking now?!?

Today we’re going to be starting with setting the scene and covering how fast shit is changing right now. 

Here are some of the topics for this first episode:

• AI isn’t new, especially for enterprise companies with lots of data
  • But unlocking some of the potential for startups is going to be huge
• Will all these advancements just make marketers better and more efficient?
  • or will it actually push founders to go to market without a marketer
• Marketing will have massive changes because we primarily rely on the ability to understand and apply existing rules and processes
• What does ChatGPT have to say about all this?
• What if AI is one day actually able to replicate human creativity and emotional intelligence?
• We’ll talk about potential mass unemployment but the more likelihood of new job opportunities
  • How fast AI has disrupted other jobs already
  • How AI might simply only ever replace the shitty parts of marketing

Here’s today’s main takeaway: 

It's not like our jobs are gonna vanish overnight, but the shift is happening faster than many of us realize. AI's no longer just a loosely backed buzzword; it's doing things today that we used to think were impossible. So, as marketers, we've gotta take this tech seriously.

Instead of asking if AI's gonna replace our roles in marketing, we should be talking about how quickly it could happen and what it'll look like if it does.

A bunch of really smart marketers (and non marketers) out there are saying we need to hit the panic button. They're predicting that in just 5 to 10 years, we'll see a massive change affecting all sorts of remote jobs. Times are wild right now. So, fellow humans of martech, let's keep our eyes on the future and continuously evolve and adapt.

JT I don’t want this episode to be fear mongering… I’d actually love to chat with people that are way smarter than us about AI and get both sides of the coin, 

• those who believe AI could have a fundamental impact on marketing jobs and that AI is as important of a paradigm shift as the Internet was… people like Darmesh Shah, like Scott Brinker, 
• and those who believe it will never completely happen and are still on the AI-skeptic side of things like Rand Fishkin

I think it's ok to be a bit uncertain or even afraid of what the future may hold with this new technology.

As humans, we face an interesting dilemma -- we are capable of using and creating technology that don't fully comprehend ourselves. Our society is built on layers of abstractions -- you don't need to know how water purification or plumbing works to turn on your tap and get a glass o water.

My deepest fear is not that we adopt and use these technologies -- it's that we do so without considering the cost.

The only thing worse than being afraid is being unprepared.

I think marketers can benefit immensely from a boom in AI tech -- that easily could extend to basically any other human discipline.

Truth is that we have to deal with the facts on the ground.

I think there are a lot of smart people to consider following to get different takes on the potential of impact. We'll load the show notes with links so you can check out our research.

AI in marketing has been around for a while

We’re not just waking up to AI for the first time lol we’ve obviously talked a lot about it on the cast and have been playing with AI and automation tools for a while right?

ChatGPT is my big one – Really love it as a prompting tool to help me round out topics; I’ve used it for a personal coding project and I’m pretty stoked with what it can produce.

But even before GPT, as marketing automation admins, we’ve actually been playing with ML features… maybe not considered AI for everyone but things like:

• Send time optimization
• Automated lead scoring
• Sentiment analysis tools
• And some cooler shit like propensity models

It’s worth s...