A worrying trend is developing involving AI and early-career marketers, and I’m not the only one noticing it.
Prominent voices like Paul Roetzer were highlighted catchy quotes from Dario Amodeico-founder and CEO of Anthropic, who predicted that AI could eliminate about 50% of all white-collar jobs within five years.
Stanford Digital Economy Lab produced the first long-term research focused on the impact of AI on entry-level jobs. He calls young, entry-level workers “canaries in the coal mine,” a statement made after analyzing data from ADP, the largest U.S. provider of human resources and payroll software.
Today’s early-career workers (aged 22 to 25) are the first large wave of graduates to emerge after the ChatGPT moment of 2022. The Stanford report concluded that early-career workers experienced a relative decline in employment of 16%, while the employment of more experienced workers remained stable.
Before it wasn’t like this
During my 20-year career at GE, I was part of the campus volunteer recruitment team. This team was comprised of passionate alumni from GE schools for entry-level graduates (in my case, the University of Wisconsin-Madison). These volunteers sponsored student organizations and partnered with professors to hire the best and brightest students.
GE’s entry-level leadership development program was well known. This was the company’s leadership pipeline and required a significant investment in early career training. These leaders then paid it forward to other graduates because they were well aware of the program’s impact on the long-term health of the organization.
After 30 years of running a business, I returned to campus as a lecturer focused on digital marketing and marketing strategy. I started teaching in 2023, giving me a front row seat to learning about genAL and its impact on students. Even though I feel that we are doing everything we can to prepare these graduates for new AI-infused education methods, the impact is still unprecedented.
In my next articles for MarTech, I plan to delve deeper into this question. This is a call to action within my network. I partner with leaders in marketing and martech, as well as leaders in higher education. We need a lot more discussion on this topic, including the two cormanagers of porates and agencies.
In my next pieces, I will explore:
- Transparency: We need to be open to saying the silent parts out loud.
- Market jobs and tasks that make impacts immediate.
- The martech paradox.
- A roadmap to start taking action.
Data paints an ugly picture for early-career marketers
On the face of it, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) report, which calls the job market “fair” for 2026, is good news. Flat hires don’t look as bleak as layoffs, but digging deeper into the report reveals a clearer picture. The year 2025 was a significantly down year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the U.S. economy added only 181,000 jobs in 2025, more than a million fewer than in 2024. We need more growth to support new graduates.
A series of high profile AI-driven layoffs across multiple industries this year appears to be the tip of the spear. Many in the job market are not moving, narrow the opportunity pool for entry-level candidates. As companies hire more cautiously (and likely use AI to improve productivity), there will simply be fewer opportunities. Let it be completely “AI washing” or not, it happens; no market expert predicts a reversal, only an acceleration.
More importantly, the broader narrative of AI’s impact on employment still focuses on replacements and layoffs. New graduates cannot be replaced if they have never been hired. We must be prepared to speak these discrete passages out loud and explain these broader impacts to entry-level candidates so they know the reality.
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I recently spoke at an event sponsored by a student organization. During that conference, and in the one-on-one discussions that followed, several students said they appreciated understanding why this was happening. This is a very different job market that graduates faced coming out of the 2008 financial crisis. Although painful, this was more limited to certain markets and disciplines and a rebound was more predictable.
Think of marketing jobs as marketing tasks
The voices I trust most in this space are Roetzer and Mike Kaput of the Marketing AI Institute and SmarterX. What I appreciate most is their willingness to be transparent, even though they often don’t like what they say. On their weekly podcast, they point out that “the gap between what AI can do and what entry-level workers are typically asked to do” has effectively shrunk to zero.
Roetzer openly reveals that even though SmarterX is growing rapidly, it has difficulty finding positions for entry-level workers, even if it wants to hire them. He owned a marketing agency for 16 years and was HubSpot’s first agency client.
When asked if certain types of roles were being quickly impacted by AI in a recent AI Answers podcastRoetzer said, “If you were just executing (creating landing pages, writing copy, etc.), you’re done. This isn’t a job one or two years from now. I want to create job opportunities for students right out of college. I don’t know what they are now.”
Roetzer said AI isn’t just temporarily disrupting these roles; it completely redefines them.
He also discussed a framework that breaks down historical jobs into a container for a series of tasks.
Specifically, Roetzer recommends putting any traditional job description into a custom GPT he created called JobsGPT. It breaks down jobs into a series of tasks to assess the position’s level of exposure to AI capabilities. It’s striking to see things arranged like this. I tried it using several examples, and you can literally see why this is going to impact jobs.
Roetzer’s team also launched an AI marketing industry council, which commissioned a global study AI Impact Report. This report concluded that within the next one to two years, “advancements in AI models and agent capabilities will drive a radical transformation of marketing talent, teams and organizational structures.
Marketers are also likely feeling the pressure. They are often the executives responsible for recruiting and training entry-level marketers. Julie Bédard, managing partner of the Boston Consulting Groupleads various research efforts on how AI will transform the workforce. She and her team use models to predict which jobs will change the most, saying on the most recent episode of the Hard Fork podcast that “a marketing manager’s (jobs) are 90% disrupted from a skills perspective.”
The martech paradox
We also need to look at the role martech leaders need to play in this disruption. For over 15 years, this space has fueled the growth of martech as a career path. The growth of technology and marketing operations from organizational misfits to strategic advisors and operators has been an incredible journey. We were early adopters and have often led the AI adoption charge in respective organizations, either internally or within agencies/consultants.
Although martech has fueled its own concerns about job replacement as it matures, it has been mostly positive because it has also fueled the growth of an entirely new job category. If the martech community fails to take a leadership role in solving this problem, we will also be seen as one of the causes of the problem. this talent crisis.
