Jobs Archives - Post Control Marketing

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.

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

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!

So much of our life is impacted by our online presence today that many are managing their careers by treating themselves as a brand. Personal branding is marketing yourself and your career like a product.

Personal branding incorporates many disciplines: Marketing to create your brand, advertising to promote yourself, and public relations for reputation management and press coverage. Not a once and done project, personal branding is an ongoing process of establishing a desired image to obtain career opportunities.

Like it or not, you have an online personal brand. You might as well be intentional about managing it and invest time in a plan.

What signs are you sending on social media? Do you have a social media plan for your personal brand?

What signs are you sending?

A Career Builder survey found 70% of employers use social media to research job candidates and 54% have decided not to hire a candidate based on their social media. Not managing your personal social media can keep you from advancing in the hiring process.

On the other hand, 57% of employers say they’re less likely to interview you if they find no information about you online. Not having any social media presence or trying to keep it all private can negatively impact your career job prospects as well.

Other research says that 91% of employers today use social media to hire talent. If you don’t participate you may be missing exciting opportunities. You can’t find your dream job if you’re not looking in the right place. With these stats in mind perhaps it is time to create or revisit your personal brand and manage it through a social media plan.

The good news is that if you know how to market a business you know how to market yourself. With some tweaking the same strategies that work for forming social media plans for organizations and corporations can be applied to your own personal brand.

How to develop a social media plan for your personal brand:

Identify your personal brand objective. What is that dream job, position, or service opportunity you are ultimately seeking? List specific titles and/or companies/organizations.
Define your target audience. Who would be the decision maker to put you in that position? Develop a “buyer persona” for the hiring manager.
Perform a personal situation analysis. Conduct a social media audit of your personal social media channels. Summarize results in a SWOT graphic or matrix.
Formulate your personal brand message. Identify what you want the hiring managers to think. What messages will get them there? Establish a brand voice and set focused topic guidelines to direct your posts.
Identify key social media platforms. What social channels do you need to deliver the right message to the right people? What needs to change in your current social media platforms and which do you need to add?
List key skills employers are seeking. Search job descriptions and ads. Emphasize those skills with keyword optimization of your social media content, profiles, and digital résumés. In direct messages add personalized insights about the company or person.
Become a lifelong learner. Are you missing any important skills? Find courses, certifications, full degrees or certificates to learn those those skills and earn signal sending qualifications. Then add those degrees/badges to your social profiles.

Don’t forget the value of live connections.

Finally, keep your online personal brand, but also don’t underestimate the importance of in-person connections. Seek out professional networking opportunities and attend all you can – even when many have become virtual. That live, face-to-face connection is still important and nothing is better for relationship building.

Those conversations that occur in the hallways between sessions and in chat boxes make a difference. Since the pandemic 71% of employers are rapidly expanding their digital recruiting capabilities adding information sessions, video panels and one-on-one video sessions.

Personal connections are remembered when new opportunities arise. Whether it’s a professional conference, industry trade show or career fair, invest time building in-person relationships that can be cultivated online through social media.If you haven’t been intentional about your social media personal brand get started today.

Are you ready to search for social media jobs?

For more insights see my Social Media Career Guide: What You Can Do and Where You Can Do It and guide to Create A Social Media Plan For Your Personal Brand.