70: Exploring new paths to future-proof your marketing career in the age of AI

What’s up folks. This is part 3 of our deep dive into AI impacts on marketing jobs.

I want to start off by apologizing that this episode might be a bit rusty, I’m attempting to record this while fully sleep deprived thanks to a 1 week old newborn at home haha Our daughter arrived nice and early and, yeah it’s been a wild change in sleeping patterns haha.

In our first episode we introduced the topic and covered how fast AI could replace marketing jobs and what the transition might look like. In episode 2 we covered ways marketers can stay up to date with the latest advancements in AI.  

Next up, 

3. Practical changes and new areas marketers can invest in (today)

4. Find the top AI marketing tools and filter out the noise

Here’s today’s main takeaway: 

• AI is already disrupting martech but in 5-10 years our jobs are likely going to look very different. Now is the time to figure out if you need to make changes to your current area of speciality in order to future proof your career. 
• Ask yourself if you should double down on additional areas like data and API services, getting closer to product and customers or starting to learn about ethics and data privacy.
• Today we’ll help you reflect on different options to investigate as you navigate through this future landscape and what job titles of the future might be in store for marketers.

Here’s a quick outline of some of the new marketing areas to potentially focus on that might future proof your career if AI becomes as big as some are predicting

Outline

• AI tech implementation, find ways to use AI and automate tasks
• Data and API services, exposing data from your business to let AI assistants leverage them
• Getting closer to product and customers, deeply understanding customers is always going to be something hard for AI to replicate
• Copywriting, generative AI is great at creating the familiar but can’t yet create the new
• Ethics, privacy and responsibility, AI is really bad at displaying the POVs of underrepresented groups
• And a look into the future at emerging tech, trying to guess some future job titles for marketers

I have to admit, what spurred this whole AI series and what led to my diving into the rabbit hole was a genuine fear, or at least serious contemplation about whether I needed to focus on new marketing areas or pivot in some case.

New marketing areas to focus on

Yeah it’s a totally valid question and probably something a lot of marketers are wondering. 

Phil you had a great episode previously (part 2) that covered how we can stay informed… let’s chat about what you can do practically about your current situation or at least start thinking about career transition strategies. 

Some of you listening or reading today are probably already in a really nice spot. Our podcast mission is to future proof the humans behind the tech and if you’re already working with marketing tech you’re in a really nice position to continue the shift towards additional AI and automation. 

We talked a bit about this in the first part of our series – but I think that AI developments represent that same type of shift that we’ve seen in the past. The change always seems bigger when you look back historically, but living through these developments are step functions not quantum leaps.

Still – it bears repeating – the pace of change in AI is far faster than other emerging tech we’ve seen in the past. I think while the tech is moving blazingly fast, there is already considerable pressure to throttle development. 

One thing that is highlighted in that Goldman Sachs fear report about Millions of jobs being replaced by AI is that despite losing millions of jobs, AI may also mean new jobs and a productivity boom.

The report cited that 60% of workers are in occupations that did not exist 80 years ago. Think about aht for a second. 

I think that all you have to do to see how fast things are going is to pay attention to the developments coming out of ChatGPT. I’ve used it a bit and it’s mind blowing what you can do with it. 

I asked it to design a workout plan for me based on my age and fitness factors. I specifically told it that I couldn’t be sore or too tired while I ramped up - I chase 4 young kids at home, after all. The plan it designed is solid.

I think the bigger factor isn’t how to apply this tech, it’s how quickly will use cases become common place. It’s easy to think of an AI reading all your docs and chat logs and then operating as a support chatbot – but how fast are teams going to move on this type of work? What type of engineering is required by the existing team to get this in place? Why do we assume they’ll automatically lose their jobs? Is it possible the extra efficiency can free up time to be spent on higher order tasks? Have you met a support team that isn’t overrun with requests and also have big ideas on how to improve customer success? 

There’s a process to tech adoption, and I think it has as much to do with confidence in the tools, concerns around ethics/privacy, and actually figuring out how to implement this stuff.

Every week there’s like hundreds of new AI tools coming out. We’ll talk in our next episode about some of those tools but obviously the first new marketing area to focus on is AI tech implementation.

While the tech is new, the process of adoption is as old as time itself.

AI tech implementation

This might actually not be that new in fact. Scott Brinker recently surveyed martech folks and the most popular task in this role is to research and recommend new tools. Some of those new tools are just going to be predominantly AI driven.

https://twitter.com/chiefmartec/status/1647291680788283394?s=20 

Most of the Twitter bros are in two buckets right now:

• AI is going to replace every job
• AI won’t replace your job… BUT Someone who uses AI will replace your job if you fail to integrate it.

I think it benefits a lot of people on social media to stoke fears to generate buzz – and while there’s some truth to that, sure, one could also make an argument that AI could unlock an economic golden age.

The question isn’t about the technology – it’s about human nature.

As an individual contributor, I think AI will feel like a super power. There is no doubt that there is an opportunity out there for tech savvy marketers to use AI to level up and accelerate their own work. I think it’s fair to say we’ll see general adoption and benefits as well. 

Let’s unpack this.

Peep lays it out nicely here, a nice niche for marketers is Ops folks who continue to find ways to use AI to automate t...