The future belongs to marketers who make others smarter

All tactical marketing knowledge has a half-life. For my first marketing job, I needed to know how to spec type and create ad mechanicals using rubber cement and photostats. Success depended on expertise in yellow pages, radio jingles, cold calling, and trade magazines. Technology eroded the need for these skills, and now they’re no more valuable than programming a VCR.

Each tech wave reorganizes value. Digital skills like SEO and martech campaign management are still in demand, but that could change over the next few years. Much of the tactical knowledge that today’s senior marketers possess will disappear down the technology-driven drainpipe.

AI reduces the value of being the “knows the most” marketer. Expertise alone is less important when information is abundant. While deep expertise remains highly valuable when specialized knowledge is scarce, AI increasingly rewards marketers who can apply that expertise across functions. 

Experienced marketers create the most value by applying their expertise across functions to guide better decisions and help others succeed. In an AI-driven workplace, experience is less about knowing the most and more about helping others know what to do next.

Senior marketers at the crossroads

Updating tactical skills is important, but most older workers will never be as good with new technologies as younger, tech-native workers.

Other capabilities are becoming more valuable as we understand what AI can and can’t do. Experience isn’t so much about having the right answers as knowing which questions matter, exercising sound judgment, and navigating uncertainty.

Senior marketers must promote capabilities like these, and junior marketers need to learn these skills sooner than ever before. Instead of being the smartest person in the room, the more important job is making the room smarter.

That shift is showing up in hiring decisions. Many companies, including IBM, Salesforce, Klarna, and Ford, are rehiring workers they’d tried to replace with AI. They’re not the only ones. Robert Half reports that 32% of hiring managers who cut jobs due to AI are rehiring for the same or similar positions. 

Ford executives told Fortune that “over the last three years, the company hired 350 veteran engineers … made up of both former Ford employees and workers from suppliers — to help train junior staff and reprogram ineffective artificial intelligence tools.”

Whether we’re talking about engineers, customer-facing roles, or marketers, companies are learning they need humans for essential roles, especially experienced humans.

Here is how the role of experienced marketers is evolving.

How to create value through experience

Look for opportunities to demonstrate capabilities AI can’t replace. These include navigation, sensemaking, context-keeping, relationship-building, and talent multiplication.

Navigation 

AI on its own does little to reduce uncertainty and complexity. If anything, it introduces more. In a world of constant change, organizations need people who can chart direction without a perfect map. The ability to define priorities, make tradeoffs, anticipate consequences, and guide others through ambiguity becomes increasingly valuable.

Navigators relinquish a scorekeeper’s mentality that assumes future performance can be adequately measured against today’s plans. Instead, they adapt planning methods to a constantly changing environment and adopt more flexible measurement practices.

Sensemaking

AI is terrible at determining what really matters. Experience helps companies distinguish meaningful insights from noise. Judgment is needed to know when to challenge AI outputs and recognize unintended consequences.

Relationship-building

When AI performs transactional work, deeply human capabilities, including trust-building, negotiation, coaching, collaboration, influence, and leadership, become more valuable. The highest return on human staffing is in customer support and client-facing roles.

Context-keeping

AI doesn’t have institutional memory. It may provide answers, but it doesn’t know why decisions were made, what approaches failed, how customers reacted, or how a company’s networks get work done. Experienced workers provide history and context, helping organizations act more quickly and avoid repeating mistakes.

Talent multiplier

Some kinds of knowledge are best transmitted person to person. Young workers are typically hired for their hard skills, such as AI integration, data literacy, performance marketing, market research, and social media. Recent graduates are brilliant and eager. They add fresh perspectives, tech savvy, agility, and adaptability to their teams.

What they lack is experience and judgment. Only by working closely with experienced people can young workers learn to think critically in real-world situations, apply creative judgment, and understand business realities.

In my first marketing job, I was the only marketer, and I expanded my tactical knowledge from outside sources. The tech reseller I worked for carried Apple products, and Apple’s team was generous with training. Our agencies also taught me a lot, as did our salespeople. 

The most useful and enduring abilities I gained back then were the soft skills I learned from senior executives. Though they weren’t marketers, they modeled the behaviors of successful leaders and coached me on budget management, handling challenging co-workers, decision-making, and improving problematic processes.

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How leaders can get more value from experienced marketers

Leaders in a continually changing environment must pay attention to individual performance, but they must also develop and nurture an organizational ecosystem that gives people the best chance to flourish.

Companies must rethink the hierarchical pyramid. The relationship between senior and junior staff must evolve. One way is to reimagine apprenticeships by matching clusters of recent graduates with an experienced coach. Cross-generational mentoring could cut the time it takes young workers to reach business maturity in half while helping older workers improve technology skills.

Flexible work structures can also help. Currently, marketing roles can lead to burnout and are less appealing to experienced workers. Companies should take fractional work, phased retirement, and project-based roles seriously, supporting them with benefits and respect rather than treating them as side hustles. In turn, senior marketers must be open to a wider range of structures and roles while avoiding arrangements that undervalue their experience.

The path away from being the “knows the most” marketer and toward becoming the person who helps others know what to do next is likely to create greater longevity and influence. The marketer who develops people, connects disciplines, and orchestrates human-plus-AI intelligence is difficult to replace because their value lies in what they enable others to accomplish.