I'm Calling It! AI Can't Replace Marketers (yet)

This year (its only August) I’ve watched marketer after marketer get made redundant. A steady stream of it on LinkedIn. And in a struggling economy, marketing is often the easy chop. It's less tangible than sales, harder to draw a straight line from activity to revenue (although you absolutely can and should be doing this), often classified as a ‘cost centre’.  

I know this from the inside, not just from watching other people's posts. Part of the rationale in my own redundancy process was leaning into ‘digital’ tools. AI, in other words. The implication being that a chunk of what a marketing team used to do could now be handled by a model instead of a person. 

I understand why that story is appealing to a business trying to cut costs. I don't think it's true. 

What AI does well 

At The Natural Word, we use AI. It makes us faster. It helps us draft, structure, test ideas, move through the mechanical parts of a project quicker than we could otherwise. 

What it doesn't

To get anything useful out of AI on a marketing project, you need to know exactly what to ask it, how to ask it, and what you're looking for in return. You need to know where the output sits within the wider strategy, how it connects to the brand, the channel plan, the audience, and the goal you're working toward. You can train AI in all of these things. But you still need someone who understands it to do that. 

That's not a junior skill. It's the kind of judgment that comes from having sat across enough campaigns, enough clients, enough brands to know what good looks like before you've even seen the output. In my experience, it takes someone who's operated at director level to ask AI the right questions in the first place. 

And this cuts across every version of ‘we don't need a marketer’ I've heard this year. A founder using AI isn't a substitute. A sales leader using AI isn't either. Even a junior marketer using AI can't fill the gap, not through any fault of their own, but because the oversight this requires comes from experience, not from access to a tool. 

None of this is an argument against using AI. If you're trying to keep marketing costs down, it can do a lot of the heavy lifting, drafting, research, first passes, iteration.  

But the parts that move a business forward like getting the ICP right, choosing the correct channels, reading the data properly, shaping the brand and the messaging so it holds together as one thing, still need a marketer alongside it, directing it. 

AI is a tool a good marketer uses to work faster. It is not a replacement for the marketer. The businesses that treated 2026 redundancies as an AI story will find that out eventually, usually around the time their marketing starts to feel disjointed and nobody can quite explain why.