AI's Impact on Marketing
How to demand a 20% bonus in a saturated field — how AI is splitting marketing into people who direct it and people it replaces.
Co-written with Carlos Alvarez for Axiom Pathways.
Marketing job postings requiring AI experience are up 71% year-over-year with a 20–30% salary bonus attached, while a quarter of agencies cut junior copywriting staff in 2025 alone. The piece argues this isn’t simply automation replacing people — the marketers still employed are largely the ones who direct, fact-check, and refine AI output rather than compete with it on raw execution speed — and uses one agency’s collapse from roughly $600K to under $10K in annual revenue as a cautionary example of what happens when a business relies purely on manual execution in an automating market. It closes on the gap this creates for anyone entering the field now: since only 17% of marketers report receiving formal AI training, structured instruction in directing AI is itself a real competitive edge.