MIT Study: Marketing Jobs Face 5x More AI Risk Than You Think

We spend a lot of time helping companies implement AI into their marketing operations. Not the flashy stuff. The internal workflows, the automation layers, the systems that make teams more efficient. And over the past six months, we've been watching a pattern emerge that hasn't quite hit the broader conversation yet.

Marketing teams are getting smaller.

Not through layoffs, but through attrition and hiring freezes. The companies replacing those roles aren't replacing them with people. They're replacing them with AI-augmented workflows run by whoever's left.

Now MIT has released a study that puts numbers to what we've been seeing up close. It says 11.7% of the US workforce can be replaced by AI right now, with existing technology. That's roughly one in nine workers, representing $1.2 trillion in wages.

Marketing is explicitly called out as one of the most exposed fields.

The study uses the metaphor of an iceberg. What's visible above the waterline—the tech layoffs, the coding jobs being automated—represents only 2.2% of the labor market. The real mass is underwater: administrative work, financial analysis, professional services. And marketing. The stuff where humans write briefs, generate first drafts, analyze campaign data, manage workflows, and coordinate teams. That's the 11.7%. That's five times larger than what you can see in the headlines.

The researchers are careful to say this measures what can be automated with today's tools, not what will be automated or when.

If you're a junior or mid-level marketer, and your role is heavily weighted toward content creation, campaign execution, reporting, or coordination—those "routine" tasks the study specifically flags—you need to be very clear-eyed about your position.

The uncomfortable truth is that "being human" won't be enough of an edge for 98% of marketing teams. Maybe a handful of agencies and brands can make deep collaboration and creative culture their differentiator. For everyone else, this is just math. Your company will either adopt AI to stay competitive, or someone else will do it faster and cheaper. You don't have to like it. But you do need to understand that pressure isn't theoretical—it's already here, and it's only accelerating.

If you're not in a leadership role, your job is to become the person who's best augmented by AI, not replaced by it. That doesn't mean you need to learn to code. It means you need a practical, working understanding of how AI can optimize your work and the work of the people around you. You need to move from execution to orchestration. From creating the first draft to directing the system that creates fifty first drafts. The marketers who survive this transition will be the ones who make AI 10x more effective because they know how to point it in the right direction.

If you're a leader, the pressure is already building, whether you feel it yet or not. The study isn't wrong about the capabilities. The question is just how fast your organization moves to exploit them. And when that conversation starts—and it will—you'll want to have answers ready about how you're already using AI to do more with less, rather than scrambling to defend headcount you can't justify.

We'd love to call this “pessimistic”.

But this is just what's already technically possible with today's tools. We work with AI every day. We're excited about what it can do. But we're also clear-eyed about what it means for the people behind those numbers. Real careers, real livelihoods. It's difficult to write about the capabilities without thinking about the cost.

But our job with this newsletter isn't to make you feel better. It's to tell you what's coming so you have time to prepare. If you're reading this, you have that time. Use it.

— Torsten & Peter

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