AI Won't Save Your Marketing Career. Your Customers Might
Marketers need to return to the customer North Star.
The customer journey is the alpha and the omega of every aspect of marketing, and an organization’s very business. Understanding and fulfilling the customer journey should be a part of every marketing AI conversation. Yet, it seems when it comes to AI it is not, and there in lies a massive crisis facing the sector. To be clear, when it comes to talking about AI, I am a bit ashamed of my career history as a marketer.
As a former CMO, a leading social media marketing voice, and builder of award-winning initiatives, I rarely failed at the actual task. But I found the professional conversations tactical at best, and the role was over-focused on campaigns. It was exhausting, and most importantly, always seemed to miss the point.
Respect at the executive table is hard to get from a tactician. I’d rather not reference current campaign elements and tools, and focus on executive strategy. Executives care about the larger customer journey because it is the lifeblood of any organization. As brand stewards, marketing has an important role in the larger customer journey. This is where the strategic marketer’s focus should always be.
Fast forward to the aforementioned crisis, the would-be AI jobpocalypse discussed in my most recent article is not limited to developers. It will impact many marketing professionals, too. Based on the current marketing AI conversations, it probably won’t be easy. But there is hope for those who care about their profession, take pride in their work, and embrace new tools to support their ultimate mission of initiating and furthering the customer journey.
The Challenges with Today’s Marketing AI Conversation
The marketing AI conversation led by online influencers and technology vendors focuses on campaign creation, content development, new tools, and prompting best practices. That’s fine for now, and may be helping those on the front line who are individual creators or jack-of-all-trades marketers. All of it in some way will be either fully or partially automated by AI at some point.
Worse than the shiny object syndrome, today’s generalist marketing influencer focuses on nonstop negative complaining about AI slop, replacing creative and marketing roles with AI, the intellectual property issues, and a lack of pragmatic realism about the nature of AI. It’s dramatic, click-worthy, and a massive distraction for marketers. It incites fear and creates resistance to the inevitable.
My forthcoming book Now Is Gone: Think Liquid to Navigate Neverending Change works hard to help people let these arguments go; the concerns are valid, but the zeitgeist is all-consuming. It’s better to adapt the tools well and mindfully than to push them away for petty reasons, only to become stale in or worse lose your career path. No, smart, strategic adoption is the way forward.
Much of what is shared as best practice will be irrelevant in two years, in my opinion. We are in the cycle of Neverending Change, and what is new will be disrupted. If you doubt me, just look at the Claude Cowork Marketing plugin. While a bit elementary, imagine it with connectors to your CRM and other customer platforms, executing workflows autonomously. Instead of you prompting the tool, it will prompt you for context so it can do its job.
Look, I was dissatisfied with the first execution, but I was able to refine the process with a few counter-interactions/prompts and ended up with an editable result. I wonder if most average marketers will simply take the slop and roll with it. I also wonder if a good portion of the marketing profession even cares anymore about slop.
This trend of improved interfacing to overcome prompting and context problems is also true in Notebook LM as well as wrapper AI tools like Jasper, Synthesia, Leonardo.ai. Many of those master AI tool strategies and prompts from a year ago are suddenly much less valuable. That’s disheartening, and, again, most new “AI thought leader” conversations seem to just focus on using new tools.
Most of these conversations feed the panic of creating the next great campaign. Yes, campaigns are the critical, visible work of a marketing department, but when they lack broader strategic grounding, they become performative justifications for retention.
Eventually, overemphasizing the immediate campaign without a broader overarching customer-journey strategy makes campaigns less effective. These campaigns now seek attention instead of attraction and long-term retention. Positions become harder to justify, and executives begin having thoughts about replacement by another human who better uses AI, or worse, replaced by automation.
If you are a marketer who cares, there is hope. You are needed. The new system of creative minds managing tools to help their production requires critical thinking. It requires people who care not just about their campaign but also about whether the campaign data is usable and helpful in the broader customer journey context. The customer journey is a relationship, one that revolves around a brand’s service role.
The future requires storytellers who can interpret the customer journey data and use these tools to map great messaging to their product/service experience and fuel that relationship. It requires marketing technology minds who can implement and remove AI tools and processes as disposable resources that serve the larger North Star. And it requires a level of emotional intelligence to understand when automation, while functional, will not work for the customer.
Customer Journey Mission Focus
Two years ago, I wrote an extensive article on the future of the AI-enabled CMO within the context of the customer journey. The piece theorized the marketing strategist of the future is as much an operations manager working alongside product, sales, and customer service. That administrator meets their larger enterprise strategy and marketing’s role within it by managing creative resources and AI-enabled martech tools to serve the customer journey's North Star.
In this context, AI (really analytics, but...) should provide a living, breathing, real-time dashboard of successes and challenges in that journey. The marketing function’s touchpoints with the customer provide incredible data and insights into that larger journey. Seen as a provider of good customer journey data and insights, marketing has a more valuable role at the table.
Fast forward to the present, and I cannot say my opinion is different. Unfortunately, tools, prompts, and campaigns still dominate the conversations about best practices. But I believe the negative fears and shame are unnecessary when the marketer’s focus is on the North Star.
Every marketing AI conversation should support the customer journey and improve ROI in some way. An AI-enabled social media campaign or a new creative or advertising automation should clearly fit within that context. A marketer’s job is as much about guiding AI to achieve strategic customer journey strength and improved results, rather than building campaigns and tactics with master prompts and learning the latest shiny object. Those shiny objects are neat, but are often a distraction.
Refocusing on the Future
What does it mean to be committed to the larger customer journey? First, the marketer has to understand that data is everything in this. Great data, both customer fueled and unstructured data assets in the form of all the years of creative generated for the company, drives an AI’s ability to deliver better results. Your marketing processes drive initial workflows, and will become even further optimized. And your ability to spot weak points in those workflows and customer journey will dramatically improve thanks to data analysis.
That means fueling AI with great data and governance (marketing kryptonite, sad to say), managing its output to surpass baseline expectations, and continually optimizing it with new and better AI tools and methods. This delivers the right result to fuel the customer journey.
If any AI method or tool fails to achieve that dominating north star — a superior customer journey — then it is a fail, in my opinion. In fact, most AI tools, agents, and methods are just failures and distractions. It’s north star or nothing!
We are talking about a probability engine. Whether that’s straight-up analytics or content creation, you are getting an answer based on statistical probability.
Again, that answer is only as good as the data behind it, the context you provide, and the strategic framework you bring to evaluating the output. Garbage in, garbage out is not a new concept, but it carries new weight for marketers when the garbage comes back looking polished and confident. The discerning eye is what will separate winning marketers who serve their customer journey from spammers who shovel slop.
Further, the smart marketer of the near future knows that what gold was will become garbage when new systems and methods arise. And customers’ expectations evolve with them. Who will be the one to think liquid, treat AI as disposable, and rapidly adapt before your competitors do?
This is where the customer journey re-enters the conversation. If you understand your customer deeply, you can evaluate whether the AI’s output actually serves them. If you do not, you will ship AI slop with a smile, wonder why conversion rates are flat, and blame the algorithm. The AI will not tell you it missed the point. It will just keep generating.
The marketers who survive and thrive in this environment will not be the ones who mastered the best prompts or adopted every new tool first. They will be the ones who can think clearly about what customers actually need at each stage of their journey, translate that into coherent inputs and strategic guardrails for AI systems, and then honestly evaluate what comes out the other side. That is equal parts strategic clarity, domain expertise, and intellectual honesty, none of which you can automate.
So yes, some marketing jobs will disappear. The tactical, execution-heavy roles that never really connected to strategy are already struggling to justify themselves; SDRs, ad managers, front-end developers, subpar writers… AI is just accelerating this reckoning.
But there is a version of this where marketers who actually understand brand, customer behavior, and business outcomes become more valuable as the human judgment layer above increasingly powerful AI systems. That is the job worth preparing for by inserting yourself into the middle of your department’s AI efforts. You don’t need the CMO title to be the strategist who understands the role marketing plays and how AI can serve it.
The question is whether the marketing profession as a whole is willing to have that harder conversation. Or will it keep talking about tools and AI drama until the conversation and their jobs become irrelevant?