The headlines are relentless. Even this morning with Oracle laying off 30K people and I feel like things are just sarting.
Every day, I'm reading posts about how AI replaced a 75-person marketing team in 20 minutes. OMG, marketing is over. The sky is falling.
Most of this is noise. Some of it is real. The CMO's job right now is to figure out which is which.
Devon Shaw, VP of Marketing at LinkedIn, was asked directly: do you think marketers will have jobs in five years? His answer was yes. And then he made the more interesting case: the job will be different. Probably unrecognizably different in some areas. The question is whether your team is building toward that version or defending the old one.
Shaw framed it as a journey from testing to transformation. Most marketing orgs are somewhere in the testing phase, trying AI on a few use cases, measuring carefully, making incremental adjustments. The ones moving faster are accelerating to transformation, which means baking AI into the operating model itself, not running it as a side experiment.
Content creation is already changing. The teams that have figured out how to use AI as a production layer, handling the repeatable, high-volume work, are freeing up their people to do the things AI cannot do well: judgment calls, relationship work, creative direction, the stuff that requires having actually been in the room. The human job is not disappearing. It is concentrating into higher-leverage work.
Media optimization is changing too. AI is getting better at spotting patterns in campaign data faster than any analyst could manually. The teams using it right are not replacing their analysts; they are giving those analysts better questions to ask.
What is not changing, and Shaw was direct about this: creativity, human connection, and trust. These are grounded in human-to-human interaction in ways that AI cannot replicate right now. You and I are buyers. We consume content. We are influenced by people we trust, people with genuine expertise, people who have done the thing they are talking about. AI can describe that. It cannot be it.
The CMO who wins the next five years is not the one who hired the fewest people because of AI. It is the one who figured out how to concentrate human energy on the work that actually moves buyers, and used AI to do everything else.
Progress over perfection. That is the operating principle for right now.