There’s a New Kid in Town, And He Wants My Job: Tales from the Marketing Water Cooler
The email came at 4:30 AM. It read that, after years of my running the show, the boss had brought in a new "helper." He wrote that the move was to make me more efficient and that the new guy and I would be working together closely. So closely that we'd be sharing my office. I'm assuming my boss sent the email early on purpose, expecting that I'd still be asleep, but I wasn't. In fact, a few days earlier, I had gotten wind of the news, among whisperings at the water cooler and some vague posts on our team Slack channel. And now I had been up most of the night ruminating and worrying about the latest newcomer to our office. By moonlight and the electric-blue glow of my iPhone, I scoured the web for intel about this Johnny-come-lately. A lot of sites were singing the praises of this new helper and how they're "going to change everything." But I'm a skeptic - I grew up in Missouri, after all, the "Show Me State." And Mr. Wonderful didn't even have a LinkedIn profile...suspicious. I finally drifted off to a fitful hour of sleep as my thoughts transformed into wispy phantasmal personifications of impending non-employment.
Bleary-eyed and coffee-deprived, I arrived in the office at 8:30 AM to a waking nightmare: There, feet up on my desk, was my new "helper," my so-called partner. "Good morning, Joe. You're looking well," it said. But I was not well; in fact, I was seething. There it was, this interloper, taking over my office, tendrils into my marketing toolkit, and spinning out ad copy for our 5 newest clients in record time. 15 Instagram campaigns took shape in seconds and were already scheduled. The CEO's latest board presentation: done in the blink of an eye, complete with images and up-to-the-second charts of our sales numbers. I felt a cold lump in my stomach. This was it. AI is taking my job.
Or is it? The story is, of course, creative fiction, but it speaks to the existential dread many creatives feel about the coming of AI to the hallowed Halls of Marketing. 60% of marketers surveyed by the Digital Marketing Institute in 2025 worried they would be displaced by AI (up 35% from 2023). At the same time, there's a bit of AI Stockholm Syndrome going on: 69% of marketing professionals also feel hopeful about the ways AI will impact their jobs.
Any person in any industry deeply affected by AI transformation has reason to be anxious about the pace of change. As marketers, we need to get comfortable with all the ways AI will automate many of our current job functions, and we need to discover the niches where AI can’t go, where only the creative wanderings of the human mind can add value. AI is a tool, and tools are intended to make the tasks we’d rather not do easier and more efficient. Looking to AI to completely replace humans in any role is the wrong path. AI-first can easily become AI-worst, with Klarna and Duolingo becoming unintended case studies against replacing everything and everyone with AI. From healthcare to online shopping returns, we’ve all experienced the frustration of working through AI chatbots that are only one level of Hell better than navigating an old-school phone tree. (Press 4 if you’d like to throttle something NOW.) It’s AND, not OR.
The “human premium” is real, and efficiency-obsessed company leaders should take notice: consumer trust is higher when AI partners with humans, not when it acts as the sole creator. A survey by Smartly found that 48% of consumers trusted ads co-created by humans and AI, but only 13% trusted ads created only by AI. Maybe it's because we haven’t got that Uncanny Valley thing quite worked out yet. I find this encouraging. Even more encouraging is that 75% of companies investing in AI surveyed in Gartner’s recent AI in Marketing Report are seeking to move their human talent into more strategic roles as AI takes on more of the drudgery tasks.
For now, my focus remains on being AI-forward: learning how to integrate AI tech as smartly as possible into my workload, using it to speed up processes, stress test strategies, and assist in executing campaign content, all while keeping the juicy, brain-igniting creative stuff for myself. Mr. Wonderful can keep all the boring bits.
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