AI’s Impact on Digital Marketing Jobs: The Highest ROI Opportunity

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The Gist

AI’s job impact. Generative AI may replace jobs but will also create new opportunities. However, retraining workers for new roles remains a major challenge.
Marketing job shift. Copywriters, designers and coders are the first to feel AI’s impact, with some roles becoming obsolete as AI tools automate tasks more efficiently.
AI’s high ROI. AI-driven time savings in digital marketing should be reinvested to optimize key areas like automation, personalization and performance visibility.

Many headline-grabbing predictions have been made about the potential impact of AI on jobs. One of the first warnings was from Goldman Sachs, which predicted that “roughly two-thirds of current jobs are exposed to some degree of AI automation, and that generative AI could substitute up to one-fourth of current work.”

More recently, the World Economic Forum predicted that 92 million jobs will be lost over the next five years, while another 170 million new jobs will be created. That net increase of 78 million jobs sounds great, but that number glosses over the incredible difficulty of retraining what will likely be a variety of displaced clerical workers to be farmworkers, software developers and trades workers, among other in-demand roles. That number also glosses over the potential for wage decreases in fields where humans and AI compete.

While the World Economic Forum attributes those labor market shifts to “technological development, the green transition, economic [shifts] and demographic shifts,” a big chunk of it will be from generative AI. It’s important to note that generative AI differs from traditional AI and machine learning, which are designed to handle tasks that are time-prohibitive for humans. On the other hand, generative AI is engineered almost exclusively to do jobs currently performed by humans.

The Impact of AI in Digital Marketing

Generative AI will, of course, also impact a large number of digital marketing jobs. In particular, it will affect copywriters, graphic designers and coders.

Copywriters

Already, some junior copywriters are being displaced by generative AI tools, which are decent at drafting a wide range of marketing copy. These tools are also good at editing to space, tweaking tone and enforcing brand guidelines. Within five years, I believe most enterprises will have an LLM trained on their brand guidelines, which will be used to review all marketing and advertising copy.

In general, enterprises have been fairly slow adopters of generative AI tools so far. However, this will change as they’re able to more easily and securely deploy generative AI tools behind their firewalls and as they’re able to roll out models that are trained on or augmented with their own data.

Graphic Designers

Generative AI is accelerating graphic design work mostly by helping speed up work around the edges, such as upscaling images, replacing backgrounds, removing image elements and creating textures. According to designers at my company, generative AI is still a ways off from being able to create images from scratch that meet brand standards at most organizations. However, the help generative AI provides is allowing senior designers to do more with less help from junior designers.

Coders

LLMs have quickly proven to be effective coding assistants. LLMs have already been trained on a wide variety of coding languages, including HTML. The time savings across these roles can be significant.

One interesting data point: 78% of marketers believe AI will intelligently automate more than a quarter of their marketing tasks in three years, according to Marketing AI Institute.

Key Challenges of Implementing AI in Digital Marketing

Let’s stay focused on the impact on copywriters, designers and coders. If organizations directly translate time savings into labor reductions, these teams are likely to become much more unstable both short- and long-term.

In the short term, even at large enterprises, leaner teams would make employee turnover more disruptive. There would simply be fewer bodies to pitch in while vacant roles are backfilled. At smaller organizations, turnover will become highly disruptive.

In the long term, the trend of organizations replacing junior roles with AI tools will mean weaker talent pipelines. After all, junior employees become managers and leaders down the line. With the bottom rungs of the corporate ladder gone, it will be harder for organizations to develop talent internally and to find it externally.

To overcome those challenges, brands will likely do much more cross-training of team members. That way, if a website designer leaves, an email designer could pitch in. For all organizations, particularly smaller ones, outsourcing this work and the associated management challenges to agencies will become more appealing than it is today.

Related Article: AI Copyright Infringement: People vs. Machines

Key Areas for AI-Driven Growth in Digital Marketing

Today, much of the work that marketing teams perform is must-get-done work. This includes work like launching the next push campaign, the next email campaign or the next homepage promotion update. This work is urgent, but it doesn’t always have the highest impact.

While generative AI in digital marketing will undoubtedly lead to some staff reductions, I strongly encourage brands to look at generative AI time savings as a huge opportunity to re-task talent toward chronically neglected and high-ROI should-be-done work.

Here are some examples of that work:

Opportunity Area	Description	Why It Matters
Optimizing Automation	Revisit triggered campaigns regularly to adapt them to evolving customer behaviors and business changes.	Automated campaigns should drive at least 25% of digital revenue—yet most are under-optimized and outdated.
Accelerating Audience Growth	Enhance signup and unsubscribe experiences through contextual prompts, cleaner forms and optimized flows.	Strengthens acquisition and retention without costly ad spend.
Increasing Personalization	Identify personalization tactics that genuinely impact engagement rather than personalizing everything by default.	Better-targeted experiences improve conversion without overstepping privacy or personalization fatigue.
Creating Inclusive Experiences	Use AI to enhance accessibility and inclusivity, ensuring marketing experiences meet legal and ethical standards.	Boosts engagement and reduces legal risk while expanding your total addressable audience.
Improving Performance Visibility	Shift from campaign KPIs to customer-centric metrics like lifetime value and revenue per subscriber.	Aligns success measurement with long-term customer impact, not short-term campaign wins.
More Testing	Use AI to streamline A/B and multivariate testing across campaigns and customer journeys.	Small optimizations compound over time, driving significant gains in engagement and conversion.

Maximizing ROI With AI in Digital Marketing

Generative AI in digital marketing is going to save programs a significant amount of time in the coming years. Digital marketing programs with a short-term horizon will bank every dollar in time savings by reducing staff. But programs with a long-term horizon will reinvest these dollars to make their programs even more successful.

Given that email, SMS and push marketing operations routinely generate returns on investments of upwards of 15:1 (and that smart investments often yield considerably more than that), the time horizon you choose will have significant ramifications for your marketing program and for your business overall.

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