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The Gist
- AI adoption. 92% of senior marketing executives are looking to adopt generative AI capabilities.
- Strategic shift. 75% of marketing staff’s operations will shift from production to strategic activities by 2025.
- AI literacy. AI literacy is emerging as the next big skill that jobseekers need.
As we continue to catapult into an era of artificial intelligence, a distinct set of new marketing roles have surfaced that are shaping the industry’s frontier with a blend AI-specific skills and marketing savvy. Recruiting sites like Indeed and LinkedIn are brimming with jobs in marketing — but a close look at required skills reveals an increasing acumen for AI.
In recent survey of senior marketing executives, Optimizely found 92% are looking to adopt generative AI capabilities, and the most beneficial generative AI abilities they want marketers to embrace include code generation, image generation, audio generation, text generation and automated conversations.
Shifting Gears From Production to Strategy in the Marketing Landscape
According to HubSpot’s most recent State of AI survey, 62% of marketing leaders have already hired new employees to help leverage AI/automation tools. And Gartner expects that by 2025, organizations that use AI across the marketing function will shift 75% of their staff’s operations from production to more strategic activities.
“AI will certainly lead to a shift in how marketers manage content, impacting the tools used and the roles that make up a marketing department and this will lead to more of a need for strategists, marketing operations, and martech professionals,” Liz Carter, CMO at Reputation, said. “While you may not need to build out a big content development team, there will be an increased need for operations and strategists. Strategy development, setting a brand voice and tone — and training AI models to adhere to them — will be critical roles in the marketing department as AI models continue to evolve.”
Circuit City CMO Victor Elmann said AI skills have definitely become an essential consideration in his company’s recruitment decisions.
“We have been utilizing AI for several years, leveraging its power in areas such as personalized product recommendations, programmatic marketing and customer segmentation,” he said. “However, what has notably changed is the application of AI in creative aspects, enabling us to generate compelling copy, design impactful ads and optimize product descriptions,” Elmann said. “AI continues to transform the marketing landscape, and we recognize the need for talent with AI expertise to drive our marketing initiatives forward.”
ASAPP Chief Experience Officer Mike Lawder believes AI will drive a new marketing field of omnichannel data scientists who will work with CMOs to create marketing campaigns with greater visibility and intelligence.
“Marketers who use AI to glean actionable intelligence from their contact centers are becoming hot commodities,” Lawder said. “The days of marketing and customer service being siloed are ending thanks to newer, data-driven tech stacks that allow brands to do a much-improved job with the CX from placing an ad, to getting a purchase, to handling customer inquiries with data-supported representatives.”
Related Article: 5 Best Practices for Using AI in Your CX Strategy
Marketing & AI: Decoding the Top Skills and Roles
So, what are the hottest jobs in AI and marketing right now? Nicole Greene, VP analyst in Gartner’s Marketing Practice, said there is a growing demand in marketing for crossover abilities in data science, machine learning architecture and model validation. And some of the most sought-after skills include the ability to construct and integrate modular content elements into digital experiences, the critical thinking or investigative acuity to differentiate synthetically generated content and the editorial competence to review, refine and supervise content produced by generative AI.
Blending Bytes & Brands: Top Five AI-Infused Marketing Roles Shaping the Industry
In an interview with CMSWire, Greene said there five pivotal roles poised to reshape the marketing landscape in the age of AI.
Model Owner
Model Owners are envisioned as the nexus of business, tech and legal interests, driving transformational applications with a multidisciplinary team. This role combines marketing with a technical inclination in AI and machine learning (ML). The term “model owner” often refers to a professional who is responsible for the end-to-end process of a specific AI/ML learning model, including development, deployment, monitoring and maintenance of the model.
However, in this adapted role, they are also a liaison between multiple departments, ideally supported by a cross-functional team of experts, and serving as a link between marketing, legal and IT, ensuring that AI tools are correctly implemented and used.
Prompt Engineer
Prompt Engineers are the puppeteers behind AI, meticulously tuning and optimizing generative models. This role provides inputs (in the form of text or images), to generative AI models in order to confine the set of responses to those that produce a desired outcome, including fine tuning and optimization.
AI Ethicist
This professional is prepared to grapple with the inevitable moral quandaries arising from AI’s commercial and regulatory intersections — a concern Gartner predicts will command the attention of 70% of enterprise CMOs by 2025. For the AI ethicist in marketing, the focus is on addressing AI dilemmas at the organizational level and resolving AI’s business value versus risk in regulatory, business and ethical constraints. It could also include employee reskilling and intellectual property protection, including the application of legal frameworks of the model process.
AI Trainer, Validation and Tester
This role ensures the reliability and responsible use of AI models, focusing on resilience against external threats and ensuring privacy. Reinforcement learning, which relies on human feedback, is a key piece of many generative AI models. Organizations must ensure they have people with the sills to test (and try to break) the models to prevent others from breaking them, ensuring that data privacy is being protected and that prompts have been optimally designed for the model being used. Using tools for testing bias and unintended discrimination in models is now a standard part of responsible AI practices and by 2027, Gartner predicts 80% of enterprise marketers will establish a dedicated content authenticity function to combat misinformation.
Marketing Operations/Automation
This position is responsible for the strategic function of optimizing the execution and performance of marketing programs and the use of data, technology and processes to drive efficiency at scale — this requires tagging and automating the creation and distribution of generated content.
Related Article: Elevate Your CX Leadership With AI: 5 Proven Strategies
AI Literacy Becomes the New Marketing Must Have
As the boundaries of artificial intelligence expand, the marketing industry is poised for a dramatic shift. The rise of AI-empowered roles and the increasing importance of data literacy underscore the transformative impact of this technology. As we step into a future where AI and marketing seamlessly merge, it’s clear that the ability to harness AI’s potential will be the determining factor in setting apart the industry leaders from the followers. The next generation of marketers will not just understand their audiences and craft messages, but will also teach, tweak, and trust machines to do the same. It’s not just about being market savvy anymore; it’s about being machine savvy too.
Cameron Adams, co-founder and chief product officer at Canva, believes AI will fuel a massive explosion in creativity and that nearly every brand will need designers with AI literacy in their marketing departments.
“Generative AI can offer inspiration when starting a project or conceptualizing designs or give others on a team a way to create reference materials for designers to use. This is huge for marketing departments that need to go from idea to execution quickly,” Adams said. “There is a growing opportunity for new advertising grads or seasoned marketers to progress their careers by becoming not only design literate, but also AI literate — AI literacy is the next big skill that jobseekers need.”
