The AI-Powered Renaissance Marketer // BRXND Dispatch vol 106
And many other thoughts on hiring and future-proofing your career
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Today’s post is a collaboration between Mike & Noah on how to think about careers, plus a new “featured jobs” section which highlights roles that are microcosmic of how enterprises are thinking about building AI-native organizations.
The Polymathic Marketer
Evan Armstrong wrote a fantastic piece in “The Leverage” last Friday on what stays scarce in the workplace when intelligence is cheap. In it, he tells the story of Alex Albert, a (then) 22 year-old hired to be Anthropic’s first prompt engineer, the “job title that spawned a thousand thinkpieces.” Within a year, Albert had a new job title and the notion of a prompt engineer was in the annals of ancient history. Today, Armstrong argues that the safest, most “AI-native” job looks something like an electrician who is exemplary at their core craft…..and also leverages Claude “to build a website, funnel demand, and manage their P&L.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about how this concept applies to marketing, a discipline that, second to engineering, feels most existentially in flux from AI. I’ve always maintained that marketing is the consummate profession for generalists who are deeply curious about human nature. Marketing leaders are meant to be a wonderfully eccentric lot. The magic of our profession is that thanks to AI democratizing technical skillset, marketing leaders can more than ever come from all walks of life.
Last year at this time, I wrote about the ennui gripping marketing leaders who felt that there was “no alpha left in marketing” as the platforms incorporated AI that could outperform humans on the keys. Myopically speaking, they are correct; the CMO who thrives solely exploiting arbitrage in media buying is an endangered species.
But the beauty of AI is that while it has commoditized many of the last era’s tactics, there’s more alpha than ever for the relentlessly curious. There’s also alpha in true expertise, the kind won through hundreds of real-life business interactions that can’t be scraped from the digital corpus.
However, the cruel irony of the AI age is that being an elite practitioner of the latest thing has the shortest career accelerant window in history. The thinkboi-industrial complex that dominates your LinkedIn feed largely focuses on learning specific tools but even the best tools might only be so for a quarter. Get your hands dirty with the latest AI tools to build intuition but be ready to kill your darlings. Two months ago, Claude Code had tech neatly wrapped around its finger. For the past two weeks, it’s been described as “effectively unusable” and “no joy in using it anymore.”
Today, there is no greater opportunity for a junior marketer to accelerate their career than by building expertise in media buying in LLMs as ChatGPT prepares to launch its self-service ads product. But even this will have a short half life. Media in ChatGPT will become a perfectly competitive marketplace far faster than it did on Google, Meta and Amazon.
All told, being AI-native or even AI-cracked won’t be the enduring advantage in marketing in and of itself. But nearly all the 99th percentile marketers will have AI-native, “growth hacker” sensibilities. Effectively, they’ll be high agency polymaths.
While the tech has changed, the core principles of how to be a polymathic marketer remain the same: be relentlessly curious, default to being a builder regardless of title, craft unique narratives, know how to directly connect your work to revenue, and love the game.
-Mike
Thoughts on talent in the age of AI
I’m using Mike’s prompt as an opportunity to pull together a bunch of thoughts I have about talent in the age of AI. And no, the irony of being prompted isn’t lost on me.
So, in no specific order, some thoughts about what AI might mean for talent and careers with the regular caveat that I believe the confidence one has about the future of AI is inversely proportional to how much attention you should pay to their opinions.
I think very obviously what AI lets you do is extend your competence. The simple way I think about this is that it lets someone who might be a 30th-percentile developer who wrote some code here and there evolve into a 60th-percentile coder. This is possible both because their individual capabilities have increased and because the universe of people with those capabilities has also expanded (meaning what used to be the 30th percentile without AI is now 35th or 40th because there’s just a bigger pool).
I believe depth of expertise matters, maybe more than ever. Being a generalist myself, I am all for more of us. I even closed the conference last year, saying it’s a great time to be a weirdo. With that said, what AI craves is expertise, and finding true domain expertise within organizations is critical to the success of any AI initiative. If you want to know what those folks look like, we have featured many of them at the conference over the last few years. The reason for this is that the baseline output of the models is the median, and expertise (and code) is what raises it out of that median.
Everything takes longer than anyone thinks it’s going to when it comes to reorienting ways of working at the biggest brands on earth. I genuinely thought we might not need a second conference after our 2023 edition because AI would be adopted so quickly in enterprises that there wouldn’t be anything left to talk about. That, of course, is laughable in retrospect (and also why you shouldn’t trust anyone who declared anything too confidently about AI). What’s taking so long? These things just take time. The technology is evolving. And alignment and buy-in are still a very human activity. Will this change if we get whatever people mean by AGI? Maybe … but to know that those people would have to define AGI a lot more crisply than they do.
To the weirdo point: I think the biggest challenge that brands and agencies have right now is that they don’t have a strong enough plan on how to integrate hybrid talent (people that don’t quite fit an existing job description). This has been a weakness of the corporate world for a long time, but at a moment when we clearly need to raise the level of experimentation, it’s particularly problematic.
Next week, I’m going to teach a class at the University of Montana, and I’m sure one of the questions I’ll be asked is what a student should do to best prepare for the new workforce. One part of that answer I’ve been very consistent on is that you have to get your hands on this stuff and just play (fingerspitzengefühl!). AI is the most counterintuitive technology of our lifetimes (maybe of all time), and the best way to learn is hands-on. But I also think the fundamentals of problem-solving and hard work are still the most important things to bring to bear as a recent grad entering the workforce. I also believe that new grads are not the ones who will be most impacted by AI-related job shifts. My view (and hiring) is much more barbell-shaped: I’m interested in senior people with a career of built-up expertise and juniors with raw materials I can shape. The big losers in the barbell model are those in the middle of their careers. Again, I could be wrong here, but this is representative of all the hiring I’ve done in the space over the last 2 years.
-Noah
Featured Job Post
Ghostbuster, Deel
Author’s Note: We’re going to start mixing in an occasional section with featured jobs that we believe are uniquely interesting and microcosmic of the types of new-age jobs emerging in AI’s wake. If you see any interesting opportunties in the wild you’d like our take on, drop me a line at mike@brxnd.ai.
Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha penned an interesting piece yesterday called “from hierarchy to intelligence”, arguing that AI can finally replace the middle-management coordination layer that every organization has relied on since the Roman Army. Block notably already put this theory into practice, laying off 40% of the company, a decision Wall Street blessed with a 25% stock bump. This was the shot heard round the hiring world–you could practically feel the adrenaline pulsing from activist investors and PE firms. It’s worth watching Block very closely to see what happens now.
Other firms are following suit. On X, Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz put out a call for a ghostbuster to “join Deel’s version of DOGE” to slash processes that shouldn’t exist and revisit decisions nobody has revisited. In other words, find broken things and fix them.
It’s easy to wallow in the irony of building a corporate DOGE department but operationalizing the “how” around getting leaner is going to be one of the enduring trends of this age. For better or worse, expect a lot more roles like this to permeate technology organizations.
If you have any questions, please be in touch. As always, thanks for reading.
— Noah & Mike