O’Donnell: Is AI coming for my job? Here is how to stay relevant in a changing market

Everywhere I look, people are talking about AI replacing jobs. I’m in marketing and worried I’ll be next. How do I future-proof my career? — Lisa

J.T.: Lisa, the fear is understandable. Headlines are loud and extremes get the clicks. But underneath the noise, a practical truth holds: AI is phenomenal at automating repeatable tasks, surfacing patterns in big data, and generating first drafts. It’s not great at context, creative judgment, ethical discernment, or building trust. Your career moat is the blend of human strategy and tool fluency. In other words, become the marketer who knows how to wield AI to deliver business outcomes, not the one competing with the tool on low-level tasks.

Start by mapping your work into three buckets: automate, accelerate and amplify.

“Automate” are recurring tasks that AI can handle end-to-end (deduping lists, tagging content, generating alt text, drafting routine outreach variants). “Accelerate” are tasks where AI gets you from zero to 60 faster (audience research synthesis, rough content outlines, headline variations, clustering feedback). “Amplify” are high-judgment, high-impact activities that only you can own — crafting positioning, setting campaign strategy, interrogating the brief, defining success metrics, aligning stakeholders, and telling the story that moves a market. The goal is to migrate your time from automate to accelerate to amplify, week by week.

Next, build a 90-day micro-curriculum. Pick two AI tools you’ll go deep on (for example, an AI writing and research assistant plus an analytics/copilot tool embedded in your CRM or MAP). Set measurable use cases: “Cut personal research time by 50%,” “Produce three high-quality content drafts per week,” “Generate segment-specific ad variations and A/B tests with clear hypotheses,” “Identify three overlooked growth opportunities from historical data.” Schedule two short practice blocks per week. Keep a running “notebook” of prompts, workflows and results — screenshots, before and afters, and what you’d tweak next time. This becomes your internal playbook and your external evidence when you talk about impact in interviews or performance reviews.

Develop prompt literacy and data literacy in tandem. Good prompts are specific, structured, and iterative. Think role + objective + constraints + examples + success criteria. For data, focus on the metrics that matter most to your org: CAC, LTV, conversion rate, time to value, retention, and channel ROI. Use AI to explore “what if” scenarios, sanity-check assumptions and surface anomalies, but keep humans in the loop for decisions. When you can tie your AI-accelerated work directly to movements in these numbers, you become “the marketer who grows the business.”

Layer in ethical guardrails. Learn your company’s policies on data privacy, consent, and brand voice. Build habits: fact-check claims, cite sources, run plagiarism checks, and pass drafts through your own sniff test — does this reflect our point of view, or could any competitor have said it? AI can make you fast; only you can make you credible.

To keep your edge, aim to be T-shaped: deep in one or two marketing specialties and broad across the rest. AI increases the value of connectors — people who can translate insights between product, sales, data and creative. Make it a practice to do monthly “team clinics.” Teaching is a force multiplier: It cements your expertise, raises team capability, and positions you as a go-to for strategic enablement.

Turn your learning into visible authority. Post short, useful notes on LinkedIn once or twice a week: a prompt that saved you an hour, a mini case study with metrics, a nuanced take on when not to use AI, or a teardown of a brand campaign with insights you derived using a tool. You’re not trying to be an influencer; you’re building a public record that says, “I think rigorously, I experiment responsibly, and I ship outcomes.” Hiring managers and execs love that combination.

Inside your current role, proactively propose one AI-assisted experiment per quarter tied to a business goal. Secure a small sandbox budget if needed, define checkpoints and report back in plain language. When leaders see that your experiments are disciplined and your communication is clear, trust compounds — and so does your influence.

Finally, keep perspective. Every wave of tech creates fear at first, then opportunity for those who lean in thoughtfully. AI won’t replace marketers; marketers who refuse to evolve will be out-competed by marketers who pair judgment with leverage. Your plan: elevate your time to the amplify layer, master a couple of high-leverage tools, document your wins, and be the steady hand who turns capabilities into commercial results. That’s how you future-proof.