Six ways to shape your marketing career going forward

Whither the marketing career?

My friend Sachin Rekhi recently posted a question on LinkedIn: "Given that all PMs will eventually have access to the same AI tools, how do I differentiate myself as a product manager?"

He laid out a concrete playbook. AI fluency. Taste. Domain expertise. Product strategy. Design skills. It was specific. It was practical. And I thought: someone should write the equivalent for marketers.

Marketers (indeed, all professions) face the same problem. Marketing has always been a field where the gap between great and mediocre is hard to measure. AI is making that gap obvious and permanent.

I wrote about this in good marketing in the AI era. The short version: AI does not make marketing cheaper. It makes the difference between great marketing and bad marketing impossible to ignore. The marketer who uses AI well produces ten times the output of the one who does not. Both of them have the same job title. Only one is set up for survival.

Here are six things to help you shape your marketing career during the AI revolution.

1. Be AI native

We are not at the very beginning anymore. But it is not too late. Think of it like a football game. The first quarter just ended. If you have been sleeping through the game, you need to wake up and get on the field now.

The old way is gone. Filing tickets for website changes, manually building competitive analyses and battlecards, and waiting for others to deliver. AI puts you in the driver's seat. There is no point in pretending that AI is a fad or a phase or something you can wait out. You cannot.

I use AI in my marketing workflow every single day. I built an entire agent platform to automate chunks of my work. I created agent skills for developer marketing that apply the frameworks from my book directly to real marketing problems.

If you are not using AI tools daily, start today. Not tomorrow. Learn prompt engineering. Get good at it. Then get better.

If you are already proficient, know that the second wave of AI-native marketers is coming. These are people who grew up with the tools just like you. They think in prompts the same way you do. To stay ahead of them, you need to advance your skills again. Learn how to build and use agents. Learn how to use AI APIs to automate and accelerate even more of your work. Stay curious. The tools change every month. Hell, there was a stretch during the end of February where Anthropic would ship three new game-changing things every day.

We are in a state of constant evolution.

Sachin made this point about product managers and I will make it about marketers: the gap between people who can use AI well and people who cannot is only widening. I am a year and a half into this and the distance between those two groups grows every week.

2. Think like an engineer

You need to write code. Not necessarily production code that ships to customers. But the kind of code that lets you be self-sufficient. You should be able to make changes to your company's website and submit a pull request. You should be able to write a data transformation script that cleans up your CRM export. You should be able to build a simple automation that connects two tools.

I wrote about the language of engineering because I believe marketers who understand how software gets built are fundamentally better at their jobs. But understanding the language is step one. Step two is doing the work.

The distinction between "marketer" and "product manager" and "engineer" is getting thinner every day. Headcounts are shrinking. Engineering resources that used to be available for marketing projects are not there anymore.

AI makes this possible. Tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot mean that a marketer with basic technical literacy can do things that required a developer two years ago. But you have to learn. You have to practice. You have to get comfortable reading error messages and fixing your own code.

3. Exhibit extraordinary judgment

Sachin called this "taste" for product managers. I wrote an entire post about why taste is the most valuable skill in marketing. The argument is the same: AI commoditizes execution. Anyone can generate a blog post. Production is no longer the bottleneck.

But I want to push this further than taste. Judgment in marketing means prioritization, and prioritization looks very different now than it did two years ago.

Your bandwidth needs to 10x. That sounds absurd until you realize that your tools can 10x your productivity. The question is no longer "what can I get done this quarter?" It is "given that I can now do ten times as much, what should I do?"

That is a harder question. And most marketers are not asking it. Using AI to do the same amount of work faster is table stakes. Using AI to understand the relative impact of tasks that could be done is better. And using AI to measure and automate changes to content and project plans is next level.

Knowing what great marketing looks like is the first battle. Holding yourself to that standard when AI makes it easy to ship mediocre work is the second battle. I see marketers publish AI-generated content every day that they would have been embarrassed to put their name on two years ago. Proprietary research is the only content moat left precisely because so much AI-generated content is garbage.

Do not ship slop. Your name is on it.

4. Think strategically, act locally

You have to understand the big picture. Entire market segments are being created right now. Entire market segments are being destroyed. The marketer who sees those shifts early and translates them into action will win.

The days of hiring a "strategy person" are over. You are strategy and tactics, all wrapped in one. You need to form hypotheses about where the market is going, test them with real work, and adjust when the data comes back.

This is what Sachin meant when he said AI is terrible at product strategy. I also have tried every which way to get AI to produce a differentiated marketing strategy. It will not do it. It produces plausible-sounding frameworks that would never survive contact with a real market. It generates great checklists and mechanical project plans, but only after I have done the work and decided on a particular strategic direction or program to implement. The thinking has to come from you. The execution can be accelerated by AI. But the strategic judgment about where to play and how to win? That is still a human skill.

AI product marketing is changing every phase of the PMM job. But the phase it cannot touch is the part where you decide what to say, to whom, and why it matters more than what the competitor says. That is strategy. And strategy is your job now, not something you delegate up or out.

5. Cross over

We have talked about thinking like an engineer. But there is a whole class of new design tools that can get you to a passable level as a designer. Paper is extraordinary. Figma's AI features, Midjourney, DALL-E, and dozens of others mean that a marketer with good taste can produce visual assets that would have required a designer two years ago.

There are AI skills that can help you write code like a seasoned developer. I just covered that. But there are also tools, prompts, and best practices that can help you identify sales opportunities and sell alongside an experienced account executive. You can analyze sales calls with AI. You can draft follow-up emails that sound like they came from someone who was on the call. You can build battle cards that update themselves. Sales enablement with AI is getting easier.

I often refer to product marketing as "the ringleaders of the circus." You need to know enough about every act to keep the show running. That has always been true. What has changed is that AI gives you the ability to actually do the acts, not just direct them.

The first marketing hire at a startup has always needed range. Now every marketer needs that same range, regardless of company size. The specialist who can only do one thing is increasingly vulnerable. The generalist who can do six things passably, with AI filling the gaps, is increasingly valuable.

6. Go deep

This sounds like it contradicts what I just said. It does not.

You need range across functions. But you also need deep expertise in marketing itself. The fundamentals have not changed just because the tools have.

Dave Kellogg, who spent nearly a decade as CMO at Business Objects as it grew from $30M to over $1B in revenue, decomposes marketing into four pillars: product marketing, demand generation, corporate communications, and sales development. He uses a scoring system where marketing leaders get rated 1 to 5 on each pillar, with a maximum of 15 total points. The constraint is the point. Almost nobody is great at all four.

But you need to be good at all four. And great at one or two.

Kellogg also says the CMO must wear two hats: one to run the marketing department and another to help the CEO run the company. That dual mandate applies to every marketing leader now, not just the CMO. You need to be operational and strategic at the same time.

HBR's research on why CMOs never last found that 80% of CEOs do not trust or are unimpressed by their CMOs, and CMOs have the shortest tenure in the C-suite. The root cause is faulty role design. Nobody agrees on what a CMO actually does. Their 2025 article asking whether the CMO role needs an update confirmed it: the executional demands and strategic expectations are both increasing simultaneously. If you want to be the marketer who lasts, you need to be the one who can do both.

Go deep on the fundamentals. Then use AI to execute against them faster than anyone else.

The new reality

We are in a new world. The old playbook is not coming back. Every month that passes, the gap between marketers who have adapted and marketers who have not gets wider and harder to close.

Shakespeare put it better than I can. In Antony and Cleopatra, as Cleopatra watches everything fall apart around her, she catches herself wishing for the impossible and stops: "Wishes were ever fools." Three words. We can wish all day that things were different. That the old skills were still enough. That we could coast on what we knew five years ago. But wishes are not strategy. And nostalgia is not a career plan.

Only the bold will thrive. The marketers who learn the tools, build the skills, do the hard work of staying current, and hold themselves to a higher standard than the AI can produce on its own. Those are the ones who will still be standing in five years.

If you want to level up, I can help. My book Picks and Shovels covers the marketing fundamentals in depth, from positioning to demand generation to developer relations to content strategy. I also offer one-on-one training for marketing leaders who want to build these skills with hands-on coaching, and interview preparation for marketers heading into their next role. For a limited time, you can bundle a digital copy of my book and a one-hour skills training session. We'll take the time to understand your current AI fluency level and then work on some practical, hands-on exercises to help you level up. If you are serious about your career, this is the time to invest in it.