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Happy Friday, everyone.
Most marketing leaders learned the job the same way. Badly written briefs, a thousand spreadsheet pivots, the event nobody else wanted to staff. Boring work, and it's how you learned what good looks like.
AI is very good at boring work.
Gartner put a date on it on September 29. By 2030, it predicts, AI will let the majority of high-performing marketing teams eliminate the traditional bottom rungs of the ladder.
Then, in the same release, it tells you not to do it.
Kristina LaRocca-Cerrone, a VP analyst in its marketing practice: "The biggest risk is mistaking the automation of entry-level tasks for the elimination of the need for entry-level talent." Her fix is to give juniors the work AI can't sign off on: judging AI output, finding the insight in it and contributing to strategy earlier in their careers.
Gartner spells out three moves. Hire for the ability to evaluate and improve AI-enabled work. Put juniors on auditing AI output and connecting recommendations to business outcomes from the start. And use coaching and mentorship to replace the learning that automation removes.
I like the advice. I'm less sure most finance teams will.
The savings from cutting the bottom rung show up this year. The cost turns up years later, when you need a marketing director who learned to judge work early on, and find nobody had the chance to. It probably won't be your problem by then, which is exactly why it gets ignored.
To be fair to the cost-cutters, plenty of entry-level work was never great training. Nobody became a strategist by resizing banners. But some of that grind taught people to spot bad work fast, and you can't learn that from a coaching session.
The Gartner version only works if someone senior actually spends time with the juniors, reviewing AI output beside them. That's the expensive part, and it rarely makes it into the business case.
So look hard at your current junior hires. If AI took their task list tomorrow, what would they spend their first year learning instead, and who'd be teaching them?
Today’s sponsor:
The AI notetaker that gets the hard words right
Your AI is only as good as what you feed it. Feed it a transcript with your product names, acronyms, and numbers spelled wrong, and you spend the afternoon hand-fixing the output.
Wispr Flow Notetaker uses your dictionary and calendar, so product names, acronyms, numbers, and uncommon names come out spelled right. It pops up when your meeting starts and captures Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, and Slack huddles with one click, no bot joining the call.
Then your meetings show up inside Claude or ChatGPT through the built-in connector. No copy paste. Try Notetaker free on Mac and Windows.
TALK ON THE MARKET
Brian Halligan, who ran HubSpot for about 15 years, on building his own AI twin:
He also admits, "Stuff broke constantly. I felt dumb a lot."
Most leadership teams are asking juniors to rethink their jobs around AI. Fewer of them have broken anything themselves.
Want to see case studies of AI-powered campaigns?
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NUMBERS MATTER
82%. The share of DemandSphere's tracked branded Google queries showing an AI Overview on September 29, up from 26% on September 1. It peaked at 90% on the 27th.
That's one vendor's tracking, the keyword count isn't public, and it counts an Overview whether or not it cites you. But someone typing your name into Google now likely gets an AI answer before your own link. Check what it says.
DAILY PROMPT
Our Generate a Marketing Role Job Description prompt, for rewriting the junior role before you cut it:
Create a comprehensive job description for a [ROLE TITLE] position at a [COMPANY SIZE] [INDUSTRY] company.
## Key Details
- Reporting to: [MANAGER TITLE]
- Team size they'll manage: [NUMBER] people (or individual contributor if none)
- Primary focus areas: [LIST 3-4 KEY RESPONSIBILITIES]
- Required experience level: [YEARS] years
- Location: [REMOTE/HYBRID/ON-SITE]
## Company Context
- Company stage: [STARTUP/SCALE-UP/ENTERPRISE]
- Annual marketing budget: [BUDGET RANGE]
- Key marketing channels: [LIST CHANNELS: e.g., paid search, content, social, email]
- Primary business model: [B2B/B2C/MARKETPLACE]
- Reference materials attached: [LIST ATTACHED FILES: leveling framework, comp bands, prior job descriptions, team charter]
## Structure Requirements
Include these sections in the job description:
1. Role Overview (2-3 sentences)
2. Key Responsibilities (5-7 bullet points)
3. Required Qualifications (technical skills, experience)
4. Preferred Qualifications (nice-to-haves)
5. What We Offer (compensation, benefits, growth)
6. Why This Role Matters (impact statement)
Read the attached materials first and match our internal leveling language. Then research current public postings for comparable roles at similar companies and adjust scope, requirements, and compensation framing so the role is competitive; note the sources you used. Write in a professional but approachable tone and include specific metrics or outcomes the hire will be measured on. Close with two lists: requirement combinations likely to shrink the qualified candidate pool, and open questions you need answered before this posts.Make evaluating and improving AI-generated work one of the primary focus areas and see what the role becomes. That's the job Gartner is describing.
CMO CORNER
Free time is a tool for strategy. Stop handing it out as a reward.
When AI clears a junior's task list, those hours are the training budget. Spend them on reviews and real feedback on judgment calls.
We provide consulting services for CMOs on AI strategy for marketing teams through our Teamless offering.
TOOL UPGRADE
If the juniors stay, they need training that scales. Three ways to build it:
Colossyan — best for L&D and marketing ops teams turning documents into interactive training videos, in 80+ languages. Try Colossyan here →
Guideless AI — best for recording how your team actually does a task, click by click, as a narrated video guide. Try Guideless AI here →
AI Studios — best for enterprise teams that need presenter-led explainers with custom avatars, without cameras or crews. Try AI Studios here →
We have 300+ curated, filtered, and categorized AI tools in our directory. Browse to find the best ones that help your marketing team.
→ We have 300+ curated, filtered, and categorized AI tools in our directory. Browse to find the best ones that help your marketing team.
LEARN THIS
Before anyone redraws the org chart: AI Skills Gap Analysis Framework for Marketing Teams. Map what your team can do against what AI changes, role by role, starting with the junior roles.
→ We publish workshops, courses, guides, manuals, and more on AI marketing for free. Browse our learning resources for free.
BRAND SLOP
100 Thieves teamed up with Old School RuneScape on a merch drop. The teaser shirt showed the game's icons, except a few of them were wrong. A hockey mask where a prayer symbol should be. An arrow pointing both ways.
RuneScape players spotted it. The company opened its apology with "We messed up," explained that one designer used AI to hurriedly edit the art at the last stage, and added that "AI has no place in our apparel design."
The fastest QA team you'll ever have is a licensing partner's fans, and they work for free.
Who checks the last edit on your co-branded work, and do they know the fans already will?