Gartner put out a prediction last week that landed in a few of my inboxes. By 2030, it expects the majority of high-performing marketing teams to eliminate what it calls the traditional bottom rungs of the corporate ladder. Marketing Dive, reporting on the same research, added a number from the present. Eighteen percent of senior marketing leaders say they have already cut roles because of AI.
I don't doubt the direction. I've watched one marketer with the right tools do what used to take a coordinator, a junior analyst, and most of a week. The entry-level tasks, pulling the report, formatting the deck, drafting the first version of the email, are the ones AI does well now. If you're staffing against this quarter's workload, those jobs are hard to justify.
What worries me is what the bottom rung was actually for. It was never only cheap production. It was where people learned to tell a good result from a plausible one. You built that by doing the small work, getting it wrong, getting corrected, and doing it again. A junior marketer who spent a year pulling campaign numbers eventually knew when a number looked off before anyone told them. That instinct is the thing we now say makes human judgment valuable. We are talking about removing the stage where it gets made.
Gartner's own people make a version of this point. The guidance in the Marketing Dive piece is not to cut the roles and move on, but to hand junior hires higher-value work earlier, evaluating AI output and connecting recommendations to real outcomes, with coaching behind it. That is the right idea. It is also harder and more expensive than it sounds, because it asks a senior person to spend time teaching instead of shipping, at the exact moment AI is making shipping look free.
I teach the people this affects. My students are going to graduate into a market where the first job they were counting on is being automated out from under them, and where the skill that is supposed to protect them, judgment, is the one that used to take a few years on the job to build. I don't have a tidy answer for them yet. I tell them to get close to real decisions early, and to treat an AI draft as something to interrogate rather than tidy up.
What I keep coming back to is that this is not really a content problem or a tools problem. It is an org design problem that is being treated as a productivity win. The teams that handle it well won't be the ones that cut fastest. They will be the ones that work out how to build judgment on purpose, now that it has stopped happening by accident.
I'm asking the Vancouver marketing leaders I'm talking to this fall how they are thinking about their junior hires. The answers so far are less certain than the predictions, which is usually a sign the question is a real one.
Sources
- Gartner, on high-performing marketing teams eliminating entry-level roles by 2030: gartner.com
- Marketing Dive, on CMOs rethinking entry-level talent as AI alters marketing needs: marketingdive.com