A worrying trend is developing involving AI and short-term marketers, and I’m not the only one seeing it.
Leading voices like Paul Roetzer highlighted eye-catching quotes from Dario Amodei, founder and CEO of Anthropic, who predicted that AI could eliminate nearly 50 percent of all menial jobs within five years.
Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab has produced the first long-term study focusing on the impact of AI on early careers. It called young, entry-level workers “canaries in the coal mine,” a declaration made after analyzing data from ADP, the largest US HR/payroll software provider.
Today’s young workforce (aged 22–25) is the first major wave of graduates to emerge after the 2022 ChatGPT moment. The Stanford report concluded that entry-level workers experienced a 16% drop in employment, while employment of more experienced workers remained stable.
It wasn’t used to be like this
During my 20-year career at GE, I served on the campus recruiting volunteer team. That group included passionate graduate students from GE schools aimed at entry-level grads (mine, the University of Wisconsin-Madison). These volunteers sponsored student organizations and worked with faculty to recruit the best and brightest students.
GE’s entry-level leadership development program was well known. It was the company’s leadership pipeline and required a significant investment in early career training. Those leaders then passed it on to other levels because they were well aware of the impact of this program on the long-term health of the organization.
After 30 years in business leadership, I returned to campus as a lecturer specializing in digital marketing and marketing strategies. I started teaching in 2023, giving me a front row seat to genAL and its impact on college students. While I feel that we are doing everything we can to prepare these graduates with new teaching methods infused with AI, the impact is unprecedented.
In my upcoming MarTech articles, I plan to dive deeper into this issue. This is a call to action within my network. I partner with marketing and martech leaders, as well as senior ed leaders. We need more discussion on this topic, including both corporate leaders and agencies.
In my next installments, I will be exploring:
- Transparency: We need to be open to speaking the silent parts out loud.
- Sales jobs and jobs that make immediate impacts.
- The martech paradox.
- A road map to start taking action.
The data paints a grim picture of early career marketers
At first glance, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) report that the 2026 job market is “good” was good news. Lower hiring doesn’t sound as depressing as layoffs, but digging deeper into the report reveals a clearer picture. The year 2025 was a very down year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the US economy will only add 181,000 jobs in 2025, more than a million less than in 2024. We need more growth to support new graduates.
A high profile series AI-driven layoffs in many fields this year are emerging to be the tip of a spear. Many in the job market remain stagnant, reducing the number of opportunities for candidates. Because companies are hiring more cautiously (and possibly using AI to drive productivity), there will be fewer opportunities. Whether “AI is washing” or not, it is happening; no market experts are predicting a reversal, only an acceleration.
Most importantly, the broader narrative of AI’s impact on jobs has always focused on substitution and layoffs. New students cannot be replaced if they were never hired in the first place. We must be willing to say these silent parts out loud and explain these broad implications to entry-level students so they know the truth.
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I recently spoke at an event sponsored by the student body. During that talk, and in the 1:1 discussions afterward, several students said they were grateful to understand why this happened. This is a very different job market that students faced when they came out of the financial crisis in 2008. As painful as it was, it was highly restricted in certain markets and institutions and the backlash was unpredictable.
Think of sales activities as marketing activities
My most trusted voices in this space are Roetzer and Mike Kaput from the Marketing AI Institute and SmarterX. What I appreciate most is their willingness to be transparent, even if they often don’t like what they say. On their weekly podcast, they point out that “the gap between what AI can do and what entry-level workers are often asked to do” has narrowed to zero.
Roetzer openly reveals that as SmarterX grows rapidly, he is struggling to find roles for entry-level employees, even though he wants to hire them. He owned a marketing firm for 16 years and was HubSpot’s first client.
When asked if certain types of roles are being immediately affected by AI in a recent AI Answers podcast, Roetzer said, “If you’ve been doing it (building landing pages, writing copy, etc.), you’re cooked. That’s not a one- to two-year job.”
Roetzer said AI isn’t just temporarily disrupting these roles; it completely redefines them.
He also discussed the framework that breaks down historical works as a container for a series of works.
Specifically, Roetzer recommends putting any traditional job role definition into a custom GPT he created called JobsGPT. It divides jobs into a series of tasks to assess the level of employee exposure to AI capabilities. It’s amazing to see it laid out like this. I’ve tested it using several examples, and you can literally see why it will have an impact on performance.
Roetzer’s team also launched the Marketing AI industry council, which released a comprehensive AI Impact report. That report concluded that within one to two years “advances in AI modeling and agent capabilities will force a major transformation of marketing talent, teams and organizational structures.
Marketing managers may also be feeling the pressure. They are often leaders charged with hiring and training entry-level marketers. Julie Bedard, managing partner of Boston Consulting Group, leads various research efforts on how AI will transform the workforce. He and his team use models to predict which jobs will change the most, saying on a recent episode of the Hard Fork Podcast that “a marketing manager [tasks] they are 90% impaired from a skills perspective.”
The martech paradox
We also need to address the role martech leadership should play in this disruption. For more than 15 years, this space has encouraged the growth of martech as a career path. The growth of marketing technology and operations from organizational inefficiencies to strategic advisors and users has been a great journey. We were early adopters and often led the charge for AI adoption in different organizations, either internally or as part of agencies/consultancies.
Although martech has furthered its concerns about changing jobs as it has grown, for the most part, it has been good because it has also fueled the growth of an entirely new category of jobs. If the martech community fails to take a leadership role in addressing this, we will once again be seen as one of the causes of this talent crisis.
