We live in a world of peaks. Peak Oil — M. King Hubbert’s theory that global petroleum production would one day hit an irreversible maximum — gave us the concept back in the 1950s, and it stuck. Then the digital age gave us Peak Smartphone (global handset sales plateaued around 2016) and Peak Social Media (the year Facebook lost users for the first time). Which brings us to peak marketing headcount — and the question of whether we’ve already passed the summit without noticing.
Writing this post, I realized it’s a darker thought than it first appears. If marketing headcount has peaked, how do we grow new talent? Is marketing going to become less a collection of diverse people doing creative work and more a discipline of people running agents all day? That doesn’t sound particularly appealing. And yet, you can’t escape the current consensus: AI can scale marketing.
I see this firsthand in the companies I work with. Getting new headcount approved is nearly impossible. Any time a marketing manager asks for more staff, the CMO’s first response is, “Can’t AI help us?” The same pushback comes from the CFO and CEO. And that’s before factoring in the growing pressure to actively reduce headcount because of AI.
I’ve calculated that there are roughly 20 core roles in marketing — cover those, and you have subject matter expertise across every functional area. With AI, you could theoretically never need to scale beyond that number, since each SME can use agents to multiply their output. Looking at that list today, I think the true number of core roles could shrink to as few as 10. Agents can’t staff a tradeshow booth, but they can handle a significant share of marketing activities.
What about smaller teams that never built out all 20 roles? They’ll face the same headwinds — unless they’re adding genuinely new subject matter expertise to the team.
Getting through this AI hiring bottleneck requires organizations to move quickly: apply AI broadly, and figure out fast what scales with human oversight and what doesn’t. My actual prediction is that AI will increase marketing headcount over time. I keep thinking of the early days of the internet, which created entire categories of marketing roles that hadn’t existed before. AI isn’t quite the same kind of new medium, so the analogy only goes so far — but I want to believe that deploying agents at scale will generate new opportunities and roles we can’t fully envision yet.
Either way, the next few years will be difficult for marketing teams. Smart CMOs will move down the AI path as fast as possible — not just to find where it works and where humans are still needed, but to become credible translators of that story to their boards, CEOs, and CFOs.
Photo by Jacob Padilla on Unsplash
