The skills needed to advance in marketing are changing with the rise of AI and fluctuating job markets. Arielle Executive co-founder Steven McConnell breaks down what this means for marketers.
Would you accept a $400,000 marketing role that isn’t even in the C-suite? I know I would.
Earlier this year, Anthropic broke the internet by advertising for a product marketing lead to own the go-to-market for Claude. Salary: $320,000-$400,000. OpenAI went higher, offering $374,000-$415,000 for a product marketing lead in its advertising business.
Most of us in marketing are wondering whether marketing is dead – and whether we’ll be the next on the chopping block. Canva’s restructure this month, which affects 1,271 people, didn’t help the mood.
Meanwhile, frontier AI labs are going in the other direction – and they’re not shy about why.
Another Anthropic ad, for a research product marketing lead, emphasised the need for a track record in senior roles “where independent judgment was critical.”
Independent judgement. From an AI company. In writing.
Nobody understands these models better than the people who build them, and they still want a human making the calls. The message is hard to miss: let the machine do the work but keep a person on the decisions.
Unfortunately, I see many marketers are doing the exact opposite. The way I see it, there are now two kinds of marketer.
The first hands the thinking over. Ask the LLM for the strategy, the positioning, the big idea. Give it a quick polish. Ship it.
The second uses AI to sharpen their judgement. They do the thinking first, then turn the machine on it: attack the argument, find the holes, and chew through the grunt work so there’s more time for the decisions that matter.
Both groups use AI every day. Only one of them is getting better at the job.
The first group is bigger than you’d think, and it isn’t the juniors. An Omni Calculator survey this year found 54 per cent of managers and 48 per cent of executives run at least 70% of their writing past AI before hitting send. For experienced individual contributors, it was 30%.
That habit has a cost. In a small study at Middlebury College, more than 200 students wrote an essay, some with AI, then sat a test a week later without it. Those who let AI write the whole essay saw their scores drop. Those who used it as a tutor kept their scores up and wrote stronger essays.
Same tool. Opposite results. The only difference was who did the thinking.
The American Psychological Association found the same split when it reviewed the research this year. Passive use of AI is linked to weaker thinking. Deliberate use is linked to sharper, more creative work.
That’s the real divide. Wharton marketing professor Americus Reed told Inc. that as firms churn out slop and drift toward the average, the scarce resource “is not content production. It is distinctive judgment.”
This is the part that should change how you think about your career. For decades, marketers climbed by producing more: more campaigns, more content, more decks.
That ladder is gone. Output is cheap now, and only getting cheaper. What gets you promoted from here is the quality of your calls, and whether you can defend them in a room with no laptop open.
How do you stay in the second group? By using AI as a strategic lever – and refusing to revert to the mean.
Start with what you think. Then tell the machine to tear it apart: “What’s the weakest assumption in our ICP? What would a sceptical CFO say about the ROI of our programmatic spend? Where does this fall over?”
Or flip it. Ask for 10 campaign ideas, then make yourself explain why you’d kill nine of them. The ideas are free now. The reasoning is the skill.
The first group asks AI for an answer. The second asks it to find the holes in theirs.
Steven McConnell is the chief customer officer and co-founder of Arielle Executive.
