The 10,000 job number does not say what the headline says

A headline went round this week: 10,000 marketing jobs gone, AI agents took them. It ran in Forbes on 20 August, written by Jodie Cook, who founded and sold a social agency and is not a tourist here.

Read the sentence the number comes from. One analysis counted more than 10,000 US marketing jobs eliminated in the first seven months of 2025, reported in The Rank Masters’ benchmark on AI in professional services.

2025. And Cook says so plainly in the next line: that was before AI agents became mainstream.

So the jobs went, something removed them, and it was not the agents the headline credits. Cost pressure, digital restructuring, the post-2022 correction working through the holding companies. WPP and Omnicom cut before an agent could draft a headline.

The forward-looking number in the piece is the one to plan against. Forrester predicts 15% of agency roles will be automated by 2026.

None of this makes the trend fake. It means the evidence is a forecast, and somebody turned a forecast into a body count. When your CFO forwards you this article, that distinction is your whole answer.

Jonty Fisher, Chief Strategy and Integration Officer at Publicis Groupe, at the 21 August panel, argued AI is not a silver bullet and that judgement and curation still matter more than the tool, however fast the tools make things feel.

Predictable from a holding company. Also true, which is the annoying part.

Whatever is happening to headcount, the media surface is monetising faster than the org chart is adjusting.

Politicians are starting to ask a very old question: if the machines take our jobs, who owns the machines?

Check out Torsten’s last video about a direction in AI policy that has the unlikely support of Donald Trump, Sam Altman, and … Bernie Sanders. Quite a trio.

Try this AI-Powered SWOT Analysis Generator prompt from our AI-Ready CMO Hub:

Use this before the restructuring conversation rather than after, when the question is which capabilities you would rebuild if you had to and which you were quietly relieved to lose.

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Most of the roles being automated first were doing work nobody ever designed. The junior who reformats the deck, chases the approval, retypes the brief into a second system. That is not a job, it is a gap between two systems wearing a job title. Agents are about to make that visible, because you cannot automate a task you have never described. Before you replace anyone, write down what they actually do all day. Half of it will turn out to be a design flaw with a salary attached.

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The restructuring question is really a delegation question, which is what the Autonomous Leadership Manifesto is fifty theses about. It is on building a team that runs without you in the room, and it is uncomfortably relevant in a week about roles that existed to cover for missing design. For the leader deciding what to rebuild rather than what to cut.

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That’s it for today!

See you next time,

— Peter & Torsten

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