How Will AI Agents Impact Marketing Communications Jobs & Education? See Google’s AI Reasoning Model’s “Thoughts” And My Own.

AI image generated using Google ImageFX from the prompt “Create a painting depicting the British army in red coats as AI robots coming into town to take people's jobs." https://labs.google/fx/tools/image-fx

March 1, 2025March 4, 2025 ~ K. Quesenberry ~ Leave a comment

In my last post, I warned of the AI agents coming to take our jobs like Paul Revere warning of the British coming. Large language model companies like OpenAI, Google, and SAAS companies integrating AI are promising increased autonomous action. Salesforce has even named their AI products Agentforce, which literally sounds like an army coming to take over our jobs!

Whether you’re in marketing, advertising, PR, or communications or a professor in these areas it’s important to remember AI agents and new reasoning models aren’t magical or human. They’re simply really good prediction machines. But they’re so good AI will increasingly take parts of our jobs now and potentially replace entire jobs in the not-too-distant future.

But they’re not good at everything and not always right. That’s why you need to be involved in determining how AI will be used in your job. Don’t let AI happen to you. Make AI work for you.

Productivity gains are already happening with AI.

Ethan Mollick, author of Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI recently shared a study that found 30% of U.S. workers are using AI every day and that it is tripling their productivity (reducing a 90-minute task to 30 minutes). If you are not in that 30% there is still time to catch up. Honestly, as much as I write about AI and implement it in my classes I don’t use it as much as I should for my everyday tasks.

That’s why I turned to Gemini for help with this post. I wanted to test a new reasoning model and see how it thinks but also use it as a research assistant. Writing an article like this takes a lot of time. In addition to testing the new Gemini “reasoning” model, I was looking for time savings in researching how AI agents may impact marcom jobs.

In this post, I look under the hood to see how AI crafts responses by seeing what Google’s new reasoning model “thinks” about the future of marketing related careers. Will AI agents take our jobs? If so, how soon? For my test, I gave Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking a prompt that I know worries many in my field. Below is my prompt. I wanted a brutally honest assessment.

I asked Google’s reasoning model Gemini 2.0 Flash to give me a brutally honest look at the future of marketing jobs and how they will be impacted.” From https://aistudio.google.com/ — I asked Google’s reasoning model Gemini 2 Flash Thinking to give me a brutally honest look at the future of marketing jobs and how they will be impacted. https://aistudio.google.com/

What does AI think about AI agents taking our jobs?

First, let’s get to know the reasoning model I used. Google explains it by saying, “the Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking model is an experimental model that’s trained to generate the “thinking process” the model goes through as part of its response. As a result, the Flash Thinking model is capable of stronger reasoning capabilities in its responses than the Gemini 2.0 model.

How do you see its thinking? In the screen capture above you have an option to click on “Expand to view model thoughts” before you read the response. I did this to see its chain of thought and include the thought process in the screen capture below.

Gemini took a 10-step process to get to the final answer:

Acknowledge the User’s Need
Frame the Initial Message
Structure the Timeline
Brainstorm Areas of Impact (Current & Future)
Assign Percentage of Impact – Now (Base Reality)
Incrementally Increase Percentages Over Time
Directly Address Jobs Replacement – Hard Truths
Focus on Skill Sets Needed for Survival and Success
Maintain a “Brutal but Constructive” Tone
Refine and Sharpen Language.

Seeing AI’s thought process and its self-correction.

Before my brutally honest prompt, my prompt was to get an honest, yet reassuring answer to the question. In the screen capture below you can see how numbers 1 and 2 in the thinking process varied from above. I imagine that is how I think when writing for different audiences. That is why tools such as personas are great for marketing professionals crafting content.

In that first prompt, I also saw how it “self-corrected” in the process. An initial prediction of AI automating 50% of marketing content within a year was second guessed as Gemini talked to itself saying “That’s likely too high and broad. AI can automate some content creation tasks like basic … but not complex storytelling, brand voice development, or strategic content planning.” The self-correction resulted in dropping the number to 20-30%.

Let’s get to its final response. How worried should marketers or communications professionals that support marketing be? What should we be doing to prepare ourselves and our students for this AI revolution?

The response is broken into three “Brutal Truths.” From my research and study, most of this feels accurate. Honestly, much of the first category is already happening and has been done for years by other forms of AI. So it is not surprising to me.

Brutal Truth 1: Some parts of your job will be replaced and some jobs will be eliminated.

Below is a screen capture of Gemini’s response. It predicts 5-20% of tasks will be outsourced to AI in an “efficiency overhaul.” It includes mundane repetitive tasks, basic content creation, customer segmentation plus lower-tier performance reporting and analytics. This fits what I know.

In the last two years, we’ve seen more basic content creation being done by AI whether through LLMs like ChatGPT or AI integrations into SAAS platforms such as Owly Writer in Hootsuite. For customer segmentation, I can see AI helping with data collection, but overall segmenting audiences requires more human insight.

The final one isn’t surprising. Creating auto-generated reports off previously set-up dashboards has been around for years. The important part is knowing what KPIs are important – the realm of a seasoned human strategist. A new aspect may be auto-generating initial language around the reports and a prompt overlay. But I would not rely on AI to understand the full context.

Brutal Truth 2: The demand shift is dramatic. Adapt or fade.

Below is the screen capture of Gemini’s second brutal truth. The demand shift will be dramatic. It tells us to “adapt or fade.” After the brutal message, it does try to reassure us saying that marketing isn’t going away. But don’t feel too reassured because Gemini follows up with an all-caps pronouncement that it will change RADICALLY.

You want to position yourself in a high demand area. This includes strategic marketing visionaries (AI-augmented), creative directors and brand storytellers (AI-guided), and data-driven insight interpreters and storytellers. It includes AI marketing technologists and integrators, ethical AI marketing guardians, and human-connection and empathy experts. I feel confident in these areas and confident teaching students these higher level skills.

They don’t surprise me. My revelation came when I stopped thinking of AI as all-or-nothing. The scary AI agent redcoats became more manageable when I broke my job into tasks and reclaimed my human agency to decide what to use AI for and not to use it for. That’s the purpose of my AI Use Framework.

Whether you follow my framework or not, I encourage you to break down your job into tasks and find the things that can be automated by AI. You’ll be surprised at what you won’t mind giving to AI to spend more time on what you enjoy more. You’ll also discover things that could be automated but should be kept for humans because the goal is to build relationships and relationships can’t be automated.

The high-demand future list looks accurate. They’re uniquely human-based skills even if parts become AI-augmented or AI-guided. The key is to make this shift yourself now. If you don’t AI will become the thing that happens to you, not the thing that you help shape and influence. Find tasks that can and should be outsourced to AI and start using it. But don’t trust it for everything. No matter how confident it sounds, it doesn’t always get everything right. Use your discipline expertise to discern and verify results.

Brutal Truth 3: Upskilling is not optional. It is survival.

The third brutal truth reinforces what I said above. Upskilling is not an option. AI innovation is coming quicker than any other technology revolution. You can’t opt out (unless you’re retiring this year). Thus, you need to become AI literate, focus on strategy and creative thinking, embrace data, learn to work with AI, and specialize strategically.

I’m not a historian or war expert, but I’ll make a final connection to the theme of my last two posts. Some factors that contributed to the colonists winning the American Revolution include being familiar with their home territory (your discipline), strong motivation (defend your livelihood), and fighting for something they believed in (human ability and agency).

The Continental Army also moved away from traditional methods of battle. Your discipline, whether marketing, advertising, PR, communications, teaching, or something else, may have a long tradition of doing things a certain way. Now’s the time to find new ways to remain relevant to keep humans in the loop during the AI revolution.

I’m trusting AI for the predictions, but I’ve studied AI since 2022 and they seem accurate. They also match a similar prompt I tried in Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 and what SmarterX’s custom GPT JobsGPT 2.0. predicts. I shared JobsGPT with my AI use framework to help break down jobs into tasks to outsource to AI. A new feature forecasts AI jobs by industry, profession, or college major by job title, description, and skills required – helpful for professors’ curriculum and professionals’ upskilling.

I asked JOBGPT 2.0 by SmarterX to forecast new jobs that could emerge for marketing majors as AI reshapes the industry from https://chatgpt.com/g/g-wg93fVwAj-jobsgpt-by-smarterx-ai — I asked JobsGPT 2.0 to forecast new jobs for marketing majors as AI reshapes the professional field. https://chatgpt.com/g/g-wg93fVwAj-jobsgpt-by-smarterx-ai

In the end, I feel good about what I’m doing in my classes. I’ve always focused on higher-level strategic thinking and creativity focused on human insight and emotions through storytelling. Now I’m teaching students how to integrate AI into marketing, communications, and learning tasks. What can you do to help prepare for this future?

I asked Anthropic's Claude 3.7 to forecast how marketintg related jobs will change with AI agents and make recommendations for professors. https://claude.ai/ — Anthropic Claude 3.7’s forecast on how marketing-related jobs will change with AI agents and recommendations for professors. https://claude.ai/

This Was 50% Human Created Content!

AI Turned My Academic Journal Article Into An Engaging Podcast For Social Media Pros In Minutes with Google’s NotebookLM.

October 9, 2024March 10, 2025 ~ K. Quesenberry ~ Leave a comment

I recently published academic research in the Quarterly Review of Business Disciplines with Michael Coolsen titled, “Engagement on Twitter: Connecting Consumer Social Media Gratifications and Forms of Interactivity to Brand Goals as Model for Social Media Engagement.” Exciting right?

If you’re a research geek or academic maybe. A social media manager? No way. Yet, I know the findings, specifically our Brand Consumer Goal Model for Social Media Engagement is very exciting for social media pros! So I wanted to write this blog post.

But, as you can tell by the title, an academic audience, and a professional audience are very different. Taking a complicated 25-page academic research article and translating it into a practical and concise professional blog post could take me hours.

I’ve been meaning to experiment with Google’s new AI generator tool NotebookLM so I thought I would try it. Thus, this blog post is about our research on a social media engagement framework and how I used AI to streamline my process to create it. As a bonus, I got a podcast out of it!

My co-author and I did the hard work of the research. I was okay with an AI assistant helping translate it into different media for different audiences. Click for an AI Task Framework.

Using NotebookLM.

Our study was on types of content that generate engagement on Twitter, but the real value was a proposed model for engagement. So before uploading any of the research into the AI tool, I condensed it to just the theoretical and managerial implications sections. Then I added a title, the journal citation, and saved it as a PDF.

NotebookLM uses Gemini 1.5 Pro. Google describes it as a virtual research assistant. Think of it as an AI tool to help you explore and take notes about a source or sources that you upload. Each project you work on is saved in a Notebook that you title. I titled mine “Brand Consumer Goal Model for Social Media Engagement.”

Whatever you upload NotebookLM becomes an expert on that information. It uses your sources to answer your questions or complete your requests. It responds with citations, showing you original quotes from your sources. Google says that your data is not used to train NotebookLM, so sensitive information stays private (I would still double-check before uploading).

Source files accepted include Google Docs, Google Slides, PDF, Text files, Web URLs, Copy-pasted text, YouTube URLs of public videos, and Audio files. Each source can contain up to 500,000 words, or up to 200MB for uploaded files. Each notebook can contain up to 50 sources. If you add that up NotebookLM’s context window is huge compared to other models. ChatGPT 4o’s context window is roughly 96,000 words.

When you upload a source to NotebookLM, it instantly creates an overview that summarizes all sources, pulls out key topics, and suggests questions to ask. It also has a set of standard documents you can create such as an FAQ, Study Guide, Table of Contents, Timeline, or Briefing Doc.

You can also ask it to create something else. I asked it to write a blog post about the findings of our research. You will see that below. Yet, the most impressive feature is the Audio Overview. This generates an audio file of two podcast hosts explaining your source or sources in the Notebook.

The NotebookLM dashboard gives you a variety of options to interact with your sources.

Using Audio Overviews.

There are no options for the Audio Overview so you get what it creates. But what it creates is amazing! My jaw literally dropped when I heard it. And it will give you slightly different results each time you run it.

I noticed things missing in the first audio overview such as the journal and article title and the authors’ names. I did figure out how to make adjustments by modifying my source document. Through five rounds of modifying my source document, I was able to get that information in and more.

Sometimes overviews aren’t 100% accurate. It says, “NotebookLM may still sometimes give inaccurate responses, so you may want to confirm any facts independently.” In our research article we give a hypothetical example of a running shoe brand following our model. It was not real. But in one version of Audio Overviews, the podcast hosts talk as if the company did what we said and got real results that we measured.

I was impressed that in other versions it didn’t use our example and applied the model to new ones. One time it used an organic tea company and another time a sustainable clothing brand. On the fifth attempt it even built in a commercial break for the “podcast.” This last version gave my running shoe example and added its own about a sustainable activewear brand.

What’s really interesting about the last version is that it pulled in other general knowledge about social media strategy and applied it to the new information of our study. At the end, the hosts bring up how our engagement model will help know what to say but that social media managers still need to customize the content to be appropriate for each social platform. That’s a social media best practice but not something we mention in the article.

The Audio Overview Podcast NotebookLM Created.

It’s amazing these podcast hosts discussed our research and explained it so well for social pros. What’s more amazing is that they are not real people! Yet NotebookLM did more. Below is the blog post it wrote. It included our diagram of the model, but had trouble getting it right. So, I replaced the image with one I created from our article.

Brand Consumer Goal Model for Social Media Engagement.

This post examines a model for social media engagement based on an October 2024 study in the Quarterly Review of Business Disciplines. “Engagement on Twitter: Connecting Consumer Social Media Gratifications and Forms of Interactivity to Brand Goals as Model for Social Media Engagement,” published by Keith Quesenberry and Mike Coolsen.

The Brand Consumer Goal Model for Social Media Engagement is a framework to help social pros create more effective plans by aligning brand goals with consumer goals. It emphasizes understanding the motivations behind consumer engagement and tailoring content accordingly.

How the Model Works

The model outlines three key brand goals:

Building brand community (Reach): This goal focuses on expanding the brand’s audience and increasing awareness.
Building brand-consumer relationships (Response): This goal aims to foster brand interaction and engagement.
Building brand-consumer bonds (Recognition): This goal seeks to create brand emotional connections and loyalty.

Each brand goal is associated with a corresponding consumer goal and form of social media engagement as seen in the graphic below. Consumers can manage people’s impressions and persuade others by sharing certain brand posts. They can gain information about a brand with other types of brand content for deliberation. Then they can bond with others regulating their emotions in evaluating brand posts with other fans.

Click on the graphic to download this model for social media engagement.

Here is an example

A sneaker brand launches a running shoe and aims to build brand community (reach) creating content that appeals to runners’ desire for impression management and persuasion. This could be sharing inspirational stories about runners breaking records encouraging retweets and brand visibility.
Once awareness is established, the brand could shift its focus to building relationships (response) by providing information about the shoe’s features and benefits, appealing to consumers’ information acquisition goals, and prompting replies and comments seeking further details.
Finally, the brand can foster brand bonds (recognition) by sharing content that resonates with runners’ social bonding and emotion regulation needs, such as posts about the challenges and rewards of training, which encourage likes and emotional connections.

Key Insights from the Study

The study found that simply using popular content types like videos or photos is not enough to guarantee success on social media. The message delivered with the content is crucial.

Marketers need to consider:

The target audience’s motivations for using social media
Buying cycle stage (awareness, consideration, purchase, loyalty)
Desired word-of-mouth function (sharing, deliberation, evaluation)

The Brand Consumer Goal Model for Social Media Engagement offers a strategic framework for developing effective social media campaigns. By understanding the motivations behind consumer behavior and aligning content with both brand and consumer goals, marketers can achieve better results and build stronger relationships with their target audience.

I hope you found this look at NotebookLM and the insights from our social media research helpful. In what ways do you think NotebookLM can help in your job? In what ways can the insights from the Brand Consumer Engagement Model improve your social media content strategy?

NotebookLM Could be a Great Study Tool for Students.

NotebookLM could be a great tool for student learning if used as a study guide, reinforcement, or tutor. It would have a negative impact if used to simply replace reading and listening in the first place. What’s missed when you use AI in the wrong way is depicted in the graphic below. It is from a previous post on the importance of subject matter expertise when using AI

Personally, I was fine using this tool in this way. My co-author and I did the hard work of the research. This AI assistant simply helped us translate it into different media for different audiences.

This graphic shows that in stages of learning you go through attention, encoding, storage, and retrieval. You need your brain to learn this process not just use AI for the process. — Click the image for a downloadable PDF of this graphic.

Half of This Content Was Human Created!

UPDATE: Customize Audio Overviews Before Processing.

Google released a new version of NotebookLX where you can customize the Audio Overview before processing. I was very impressed with this feature. For example, I had another academic article published about a new no tech policy in the classroom that I implemented after COVID restrictions were released.

I uploaded this academic article and before processing I Customized the Audio Overview telling NotebookXL that my target audience was college students distracted by technology in the classroom and to keep the overview shorter for their short attention spans. Here is the result:

UPDATE: Interrupt Audio Overview To Ask Questions With Voice.

With the latest release Google has added the ability to engage directly with the AI hosts during an Audio Overview. I’ve tried it and it works creepily well.

I created an Audio Overview of my student professional blogging assignment for personal branding. In the beginning the hosts tell students to write about their unique skills. I clicked a “Join” button and the host said, “Looks like someone wants to talk.” I asked, “How do you know your unique skills?” They said “good question,” gave good tips and continued with the main subject.

Later I interrupted and asked, “Can you summarize what you have covered so far?” They said sure, gave a nice summary and then picked back up where they left off. Finally, I asked about being nervous putting a blog out in public. The hosts reassured me that I don’t have to be perfect. People value honesty and personality. It’s not about perfection.