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 are in marketing. Advertising, PR, or Corporate Communications or are a professor in these areas it is important to remember that AI agents and the new reasoning models are not magical or human. They are simply really good prediction machines. But they are so good that AI will increasingly take parts of our jobs now and potentially replace entire jobs in the not-too-distant future.
But they are 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. In all honesty, 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 its responses while 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.
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 of my prompt 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
- 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, I submitted a prompt to get an honest, yet reassuring answer to the same 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 in crafting content.
In that first prompt, I also saw an example of 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.” This self-correction resulted in it dropping that number down to 20-30%.
Now let’s get to its final response. How worried should we be as professional marketers or communications professionals that support marketing? What should we be doing to prepare ourselves and our students for this revolution? The response is broken into three “Brutal Truths.” From my research and study over the years, 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 the screen capture of Gemini’s response. It predicts 5-20% of all tasks will be outsourced to AI in an “efficiency overhaul.” This includes mundane and repetitive tasks, basic content creation, and 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 is not a surprise. Creating auto-generated reports off previously set-up dashboards has been around for years. The important part is knowing what KPIs are important in the first place – the realm of a seasoned human strategist. The new aspect may be auto-generating the initial language around the reports and a prompt overlay. But I still 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 which is that the demand shift will be dramatic. Gemini tells us to “adapt or fade.” After the brutal message, it does try to quickly reassure us saying that marketing isn’t going away. But don’t feel too good about that reassurance because it is followed up with an all-caps pronouncement that it is changing RADICALLY.
Obviously, you want to position yourself to be in one of the high demand areas such as strategic marketing visionaries (AI-augmented), creative directors and brand storytellers (AI-guided), data-driven insight interpreters and storytellers, AI marketing technologists and integrators, ethical AI marketing guardians, and human-connection and empathy experts. At first glance, I feel competent in many of these areas and confident in teaching my students these higher level skills.
Once again, this doesn’t surprise me. My revelation in AI came when I stopped thinking of it as this all-or-nothing entity. The big scary redcoats coming became more manageable when I broke down my job into tasks and reclaimed my human agency to intentionally decide what to use AI for and what not to use it for. What I learned I put into my AI Use Framework. It helped me and can help you break down anything into single tasks and their goals.
Whether you follow my framework or not, I encourage everyone to do this exercise of breaking down your job into tasks and intentionally finding the things that can easily be automated by AI. You will be surprised at what you won’t mind giving to AI to spend more time on what you enjoy more anyway. 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. Those are all 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. Quickly find those tasks that can and should be outsourced to AI and then start using it. Just 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. It’s about survival. 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 am not a history professor or war strategy expert, but I’ll make one 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 was also willing to move away from traditional methods of battle. Your discipline, whether it’s marketing, communications, advertising, PR, teaching, or something else, may have a long tradition of doing things a certain way. Now is the time to find new methods to remain relevant and keep humans in the loop in light of the AI revolution.
I’m trusting AI for these predictions, but I’ve been studying 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 decide what to outsource to AI. The 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 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?
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