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How marketing employment might be disrupted when the economic value of intelligence is zero
There have been two passionate and vocal camps when it comes to the AI impact on marketing employment.
Some insiders like Dennis Hassabis of Google are optimistic that AI will create an abundance of jobs. Sam Altman has been clear that AI will aggressively replace jobs (including 95% of marketing!). Marketing guru Rand Fishkin says poppycock to that and claims marketing will thrive in this well-researched post.
What is true? Having an idea of what’s coming next seems pretty important to our companies and jobs! In this post, I provide my view of what I believe is likely, followed by some possible safeguards for our careers.
Guiding observations about AI
Some people have characterized me as a “futurist,” but what I really do is take observable facts and think deeply about the implications of what comes next. If you cut through the AI hype, there are three guiding observations we can reliably build on:
- AI drives the economic value of intelligence to near zero.
- AI is an enabling technology, but also a replacement technology
- Companies are incentivized to adopt new technology when there is an immediate and measurable ROI
