Written by Julien Ricciarelli-Bonnal

23 December 2025

AI Will Destroy 80% of Marketing… Just Not the Part You Think

For the past year, the same anxious question has been circulating in boardrooms, podcasts, conferences and Slack channels: “Is AI going to kill marketing jobs?” The short answer is yes, absolutely. But the real answer, the one nobody wants to articulate out loud, is far more uncomfortable. AI is not here to destroy marketing. It is here to destroy fake marketing — the part that never relied on reasoning, insight or strategic thinking. Everything else, the work that requires analysis, interpretation, judgment, coherence and real market understanding, is about to become ten times more valuable.

AI does not threaten experts. It threatens executors disguised as strategists. And in a sector overflowing with recycled content, copy-pasted frameworks, hollow LinkedIn motivational posts and “specialists” who have never actually led a real strategy in their entire career, the clean-up is not only inevitable, it is healthy.

AI replaces what was never truly marketing in the first place

Let’s stop pretending. Eighty percent of what we call marketing today is nothing more than repetitive mechanical execution masquerading as expertise. Churning out content, summarizing what others already said, posting generic ideas, writing interchangeable website pages, producing newsletters nobody reads, creating prefab visuals, or repackaging advice circulating on every platform.

This is exactly the kind of work systems like ChatGPT 5.2 or Gemini 3 perform flawlessly. They copy, they synthesize, they sequence, they accelerate. They don’t think, they don’t arbitrate, they don’t read market signals or sense cultural shifts, but they excel at everything that requires no real strategic brainpower.

In other words, AI is replacing what many people believed was a profession… when it was actually just a task. Mimicry disappears. Actual marketing enters a new golden age.

It is a brutal separation, but a necessary one. And it was overdue.

Thinking survives. Noise disappears.

CWhat AI cannot reproduce is precisely what makes a senior marketing consultant, strategist or fractional CMO valuable. AI can string words together, but it cannot form a vision. It can generate a plan, but not diagnose a situation. It can answer a question, but not determine the right question in the first place.

Marketing remains a human discipline the moment it requires someone to understand a context, prioritize intelligently, identify a true market pain point, decide what a brand should or should not say, build coherence over time, and assume responsibility for a clear strategic direction.

This is why strategic audits are becoming a central weapon again. AI cannot analyze a company as a living organism. It cannot detect contradictions, tone inconsistencies, political tensions, internal blind spots, or positioning errors masked by habit.

And it cannot replace the instinct of an experienced professional who feels a market before they map it, who reads signals before they’re obvious, who senses when a brand architecture is fragile long before KPIs confirm it.

The uncomfortable truth: a whole generation learned tools, not marketing

Let’s be brutally honest. A significant portion of the industry never learned marketing. They learned tutorials. They learned Notion templates. They learned PDF frameworks sold on LinkedIn. They learned content formats. They learned algorithms. They learned visibility tricks.

• They learned the tool, not the craft.
• The form, not the substance.
• The imitation, not the thinking.

So the arrival of AI functions as a merciless spotlight. Those whose value rested on knowing how to operate a tool suddenly discover that this mastery is now completely trivial. Those who never developed autonomous marketing thinking now watch a machine reproduce exactly what they were doing.

The discomfort is not that AI steals their job. It is that AI reveals they never had one in the first place.

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The future of marketing will not be AI-driven. It will be human-driven, AI-amplified.

The real divide is not technological. It is intellectual. There are those who let themselves be replaced, and those who reinforce their value. There are those who see AI as a threat, and those who use it as leverage.

A marketer who knows how to think, structure, assess, prioritize, interpret and embody a vision becomes vastly more powerful with AI at their side. A marketer who was merely executing tasks is replaced instantly, often without realizing when the replacement actually happened.

The marketing world is not entering automation. It is entering adulthood. And, as always, when a new technology accelerates everything, the winners are not the loudest — they are the clearest, the most coherent and the most lucid.