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AI isn’t quite coming for marketing jobs—but it sure is stressing some marketers out, according to a new report from LinkedIn.
The growing presence of AI in the industry is contributing to a sense of stress for marketers, according to LinkedIn’s Fall 2024 Global Marketing Jobs Outlook. While 91% of surveyed marketing professionals said they are happy in their jobs, 72% reported that they “feel overwhelmed by how quickly their job is changing,” the study found.
Credit the growth of AI for some of those feelings. 59% of marketers are already using AI in their jobs, the study found, and there’s a growing focus on being able to use the technology in everyday tasks. Some of the common ways AI is currently used in marketing include campaign automation, chatbots for customer support, and website operation and optimization, according to Harvard Business Review.
Not a robot: Despite the attention on AI, though, LinkedIn found that some of the most sought-after skills in the marketing industry are entirely human.
“Collaborative problem-solving” is LinkedIn’s Skill of the Year, which has, since 2021, grown by 138% when measuring the amount of members posting the skill on the platform. Other soft skills of import include relationship building, agility, creativity, teamwork, and emotional intelligence, the study found.
Keeping creativity a priority can also help marketers get hired. The report cited the B2B Marketing Benchmark, which found that a majority of employers are not only more open to prioritizing skills over education when hiring, but that the skills they are seeking are more likely to be creative than technical.
Take Duolingo’s chaotic but often well-received approach to social marketing, for example. The green owl’s TikTok antics demonstrate that audiences can respond well to innovative and original ideas—and Zaria Parvez, the marketer behind the owl’s social media presence, has since been promoted twice.
That’s not to say technical skills have gone by the wayside. The top three hard skills the study found were added to LinkedIn profiles from 2021 to 2023 were creative execution, artificial intelligence, and marketing technology.
As the industry continues to respond to generative AI advances, Tequia Burt, editor in chief of the LinkedIn Collective and LinkedIn for Marketing blog, predicted in the foreword to the study that marketers will be able to focus “most of their time to tasks demanding human judgment and creativity.”
So while AI might be the “It” girl of the marketing industry, it seems that it still can’t compare to living, breathing, human collaboration.