The Battle Against Being Obsolete

In 2018, a World Economic Forum report predicted that 75 million jobs will be gone by 2022 due to artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and automation.

Let me tell you about my personal experience with the battle against being obsolete: I studied linguistics because I wanted to become a proofreader. During the second year of my studies, one of the professors that also worked with the Linguistics Institute briefly introduced a computer program that was being developed – its purpose was to proofread texts in my native language. This was in 2013.

At that time, there was already the language proofing tool in Microsoft Word but its capacity was limited to recognizing typos and correct use of commas at best. Yet the program we were shown, even though it looked primitive in design, had quite impressive proofreading abilities. I understood that proofreaders will be completely obsolete sooner rather than later. I still finished the Bachelor’s Degree but I didn’t want to waste my time on a Master’s. Shortly after, Grammarly and other linguistics tools were everywhere. You won’t be surprised if I tell you that none of my close friends that continued and got their Master’s Degrees were able to land a job in the field they studied.

As for me, the linguistics skills still served me well and got me into the world of marketing. At first, I spent a lot of time on the “creative” side: copywriting articles, newsletters, press releases and social media posts. I then went into a more technical sphere of managing customer databases, setting mass mailer campaigns, and planning digital ad campaigns. At that point a big chunk of my work involved managing automation tools. When the campaigns were planned out and the texts were drafted, I would set up a system of automated dispatching based on specific customer criteria and I'd configure a set of automated tasks that would be triggered according to the customer response.

While a lot of components in marketing were becoming automated and there was no need for hours of manual work, it seemed to me like the actual human creativity will always be needed. Somebody still had to write the texts for the messages and the ads, right? Well, guess what – there’s now AI Writing Assistant Software that writes the texts for you.

Persado is one of them, and this is what they say about the product: “Our AI-powered message machine understands language and breaks down marketing creative into its critical elements: narrative, emotion, descriptions, calls-to-action, formatting, and word positioning. The machine applies its understanding of language to a marketing brief from your team, creating the best message to speak to your customers in your brand’s voice across all channels. Every word makes the right emotional appeal with Persado’s AI-powered knowledgebase of more than 1 million tagged and scored words, phrases, and images in 25 languages.”

The price is not published on their website, I found a $3000/month figure with a quick Google search but the data is old so it might have changed by now. They already have some competitors and I’m sure one of them will eventually offer the basic package for free, just like most products do (take Grammarly, MailChimp, SurveyMonkey and other marketing tools as an example).

The “creativity” in the sense that we know it will soon not be required anymore. “AI-driven production” based on the analysis of previously created content will be just enough to write marketing messages.

This makes me wonder - what are the fields within Marketing that will still be needed 10 years from now, for example? Could the main job of the marketer become simply interconnecting various programs and setting the times for them to execute tasks on their own?