AI is eating marketing. Here’s how marketers can stay relevant

AI is eating marketing. 

I’m not talking about the Mark Zuckerberg style of AI adpocalypse where AI makes all the ads. I’m talking about all the various tasks that marketing teams and marketing pros do all the time.

Like … all the stuff:

• Analysis
• Creative
• Messaging
• Content
• Budgets
• Targeting

I recently had a great chat with Lior Eldan, COO of Moburst on the Growth Masterminds Podcast. All of this, literally almost everything marketers do and work, is getting massively transferred by AI.

Hit play, then keep scrolling:

 

AI is eating marketing

There are over 15,000 tools in the 2025 Martech Landscape that Chief Martech, Scott Brinker, started in 2011 with just 150 solutions. AI integration in those martech tools is now almost universal: brands, platforms, analytics, personalization systems, and content tools nearly all incorporate AI in some shape or form.

What spurred the change?

LLMs. Especially ChatGPT.

There was a “massive explosion of AI-native products that surged after the release of ChatGPT,” says Mike Pastore at Martech. “AI is rapidly redefining and replacing the stack architecture,” says Frans Riemersma, who works with Brinker on the landscape.

And the fastest-growing parts, including SEO tools, content tools, and video creation tools, are AI-centric. It’s everywhere: AI is eating marketing.

• Campaign analysis
  We just released an AI-powered talk-to-your data tool and Creative IQ, an AI-powered tool for optimizing creative.
• Creative development
  Generative AI is helping ideate, storyboard, and visualize content for production. In some cases, it goes farther.
• Messaging
  Today it’s being pre-generated in the cloud; in the future it’ll be LLMs running on-device for real-time, individualized communications.
• Personalization
  Mass personalization of messages down to micro-cohorts? Becoming possible.
• Budget allocation & optimization
  AI is analyzing cross-channel spend and incremental ROAS to guide your next-dollar investments.
• Measurement & attribution
  Post-ATT, AI is helping us unify fragmented signals from networks, SANs, SKAN, and remaining identifiers, plus and first-party data, all for smarter attribution.
• Targeting
  Zuck doesn’t think you need to do your own targeting. AI’s already doing a ton of the work inside major platforms.

This growth is following a progression to more, better, more native, and more capable:

1. AI assistants
   External aids
2. Co-pilots
   Embedded aids
3. AI workflows
   AI automation
4. AI agents
   Autonomous or semi-autonomous automation
5. Model Content Protocols
   Persistent memory and coordination between tools, agents, and data

Most of us are still at stage 1, but some of our tools are at stage 2 or 3.

So what are you going to do?

If AI is eating marketing, what do marketers do? I mean, AI is getting better every day. The things it sucks at now, it’ll be better at tomorrow, and even better the day after.

So is it the end of the line for marketers, or is there still a role to play?

I’m a big believer in there still being a role for marketers, and a big role at that. And it’s not just because the generative AI solution that we played with to help write blog posts for Singular literally hallucinated an entire case study, fabricating stats, details, and proof points out of thin air.

(Which will become less and less of a problem over time, by the way.)

There are tons of details in a post I recently wrote about how marketers including creative pros, writers, UA managers, and performance marketers can stay relevant. To boil it down into a phrase, marketers need to adopt and use the tools, but not abuse them. The goal is to have a virtual team that extends your own inherent capabilities.

Need creative ideas?

Great, ask an LLM. But pick yourself. And use what you get back as a starting point. Make it better. Make it unique. Adapt it to your company, your brand voice, your audience.

Need help getting stuff done?

Make an agent and get AI to work for you to increase your capability. Our CMO made an agent called Tone Ranger to help people ensure that what they’re writing or saying aligns with Singular’s brand voice. Agents can schedule meetings, detect anomalies, track OKRs, prepare pre-meeting briefings, and much more.

Need to be more than you are?

Everything’s busier lately, it seems. The tasks pile up, the work increases, but the number of people don’t. That’s where AI helps. Automate what you can, and what it does well. Make the machine do the grunt work. Make the machine do what it can.

AI isn’t just changing our work. It’s also changing the teams we set up to get our work done.

As AI is eating marketing, teams are changing

You’ve probably seen it yourself. Maybe even been a part of it. As AI is eating marketing, teams are becoming flatter. There are fewer low-level jobs.

The new marketer is an expert in at least 1 thing, but ideally much more. And the new marketer has staff, even if she or he is not a manager. These staff, however, don’t have heartbeats. They eat electricity. They live in the cloud.

Essentially, they are force multipliers.

That’s the new role, and that’s the new team: top-notch people putting out high-quality work while being massively assisted by AI. 

The trick, of course, is not to just use what AI gives you. We’ve all seen that: someone has a task, they report that it’s done, and you see that the result is basically ChatGPT spitting out something in response to a prompt. That might work, occasionally. 

But more likely, there needs to be a human touch: customization, adjustment, selective deletion, selective addition. This is important: the latest research basically shows that extensive use of AI assistants makes you dumber: less able to remember, less able to reason, less able to communicate.

That’s not the picture of the successful marketing exec of the future.

Staying engaged, and using but not abusing AI will help avoid that.

Much more in the full podcast

There’s of course much more in the full conversation on Growth Masterminds. Check it all out on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts from.

Here’s what to expect:

• 00:00 Introduction: The Impact of AI on Mobile Marketing
• 00:31 The Shift in Search Behavior Due to AI
• 01:23 Optimizing Marketing Strategies with AI
• 02:20 AI in Campaign Analysis and Data Democratization
• 09:21 Creative Uses of AI in Marketing
• 13:00 AI-Driven Messaging and Content Creation
• 18:19 Budget Optimization with AI
• 21:26 Targeting and Audience Segmentation with AI
• 25:09 The Future of AI in Marketing Teams
• 27:44 Conclusion: Getting Started with AI in Marketing