What an AI enabled marketing team will look like in 2029

It’s the afternoon of March 30th 2029, in the marketing department of a medium sized business that sells, well, anything. There’s no great buzz, no frantic rushing, no hurried calls to agencies and no panics about deadlines. As we speak, dozens of campaigns are being run across just about any channel you can think of, targeting each consumer with completely personalised messaging and journeys.

Blogs are being published, demonstrating thought leadership, each perfectly loaded with the right keywords and imagery to ensure engagement and prominence with the main AI research tools.

Adverts are being produced, targeted at the right audience, at the right time, with completely dynamic copy targeted at the exact target individuals, in 5 languages.  You’ve inserted perfectly created images that account for the segment you’re aiming for, personalised to appeal to the exact individual viewing them. These adverts are of course 100% compliant with all local laws and regulations and incorporate social and cultural nuances of each of the markets you are targeting. Seconds ago, a new advert was just created, released, A/B tested, optimised and is now in production.

Social media posts have been scheduled for the next month, pitched to reach your audience. Of course, the exact content will be tweaked immediately before publishing to account for whatever is trending with your audience at that time. Replies will be filtered to screen out the 87% of AI-driven bots that now dominate the space, and for the remaining humans, your company is deftly dealing with their trolling and is even arguing back in perfect brand tone of voice, with absolutely no rises in blood pressure.

SEO? Nobody really worries about that anymore. Everything these days is AIO – AI optimised. AI has reverse-engineered your content to be optimally discoverable and consumable by the major Agentic AI platforms that are making many of the product research and purchase decisions for consumers these days. 

All of this is happening in total silence. The AI powered marketing department is doing it all – 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks of the year.

It’s a beautiful yet terrifying world. But here’s the catch. AI can generate things, but it struggles with the truly out-of-the-box ideas. AI can optimise, but it can’t dream up something so absurd it actually works - like that time Wendy’s roasted the entire internet, or Old Spice revealed ‘the man your man could smell like’, or when a soft drink company implied you’d get slapped by a large, bald orange man if you drank their product.

So what are AI enabled marketers actually doing?

When AI is doing all the grunt work, what is an actual human marketer doing in 2029? Do they even exist?

Yes, they do exist. There are fewer of them, and they’re not doing what they were doing five years ago. They are the weird idea generators, brand custodians, and the essential element of ensuring your brand stays real.

Everyone is using AI today. Everyone has access to the same tools and a lot of the same data. Everyone is turning out similar concepts, in unprecedented volumes. Millions of them. It started with LinkedIn, where gradually all the content became so mediocre that people stopped engaging. They recognised it too late, and now look at what they have become, an AI powered recruitment and training firm, just like all the others. That lesson has been learned.

In this sea of AI mediocrity, someone has to push the limits and dream up the campaigns AI wouldn’t dare to suggest. Someone has to take creative risks AI finds “statistically unwise” or “inconclusive”. AI you see, wants to aim for the median. It doesn’t like outliers. But our audiences have been conditioned to the median, they filter it all out. You have to do something really different to be noticed these days.

Marketing people are playing many roles:

They are the brand therapists - AI can manage customer interactions, but people still crave real emotional connection. The companies that are making strides are the ones that build that connection to their customers. They don’t want an automated attendant that’s ambivalent to their needs. Yes, they’re happy to have all that taken off their hands when it’s not important, that’s what their AI agent is for. But when it counts, they want a real person. 

The ‘Realness’ trend has been building momentum for the last 18 months. Gen Z and Alpha consumers have grown up with AI. They can smell it a mile away. They want real connections. They even delight in human error, something their parents would never have tolerated. They would’ve been all over social media complaining back in the days when social pretended to be real. Now, if you want to penetrate the cordon of the consumer AI agents, you need to be real. Marketers have become the guardians of brand identity, making sure AI doesn’t turn their brand into a soulless bot army. Needless to say, the CFO hates the extra cost, but the numbers are keeping him quiet.

They are the wild cards - AI follows data; humans make gut calls. The best marketers are the ones who know when to trust the machine and when to throw its recommendations out the window. The AI knows the statistics, but the humans get the emotions. So many human interactions have moved offline, it’s a significant enough segment now to provide a real blind spot to the AI, particularly for the brands that want to be seen as edgy. Since AI has been constrained with ever more legal restrictions on what it can and cannot say, the Reals have become very good at testing it, throwing out the random curveballs to catch it out. We need humans to fill these gaps.

They are the ethical compass – These are not your dad’s ethics. They were built on conformity to an agreed idea. Which made it easy for the AI to impersonate, and where it didn’t, the new AI laws made sure it did. The fractionalisation of society has meant there is no single ethical guideline to follow. Being concerned about climate change is non-negotiable for some and marks you as a ‘globalist shill’ to others. The third Trump presidential term is essential and righteous to some, and a constitutional travesty to others.  Ethical and moral segments are just as important as age, income and gender. AI doesn’t have morals, it has algorithms. It can identify the statistical segment and can understand that they are different, but it can’t always navigate the ethical and moral minefield. Sometimes someone needs to step in when AI suggests a campaign that’s technically effective but socially disastrous for the target market. Marketers need to be deeply in touch with their audiences, and that can only be done by being part of them.

The Ideal Marketer of 2029

In this brave new world, the best marketers aren’t the ones who can write killer ad copy, AI does that in nanoseconds. Instead, they’ll be the ones with a mix of creative instinct, tech fluency, and the ability to make bold, human-driven decisions.

The perfect marketer will be:

A creative rebel who can push AI beyond its programmed boundaries.

A conceptualist that can see the big picture. It’s not about the single campaign or the one marketing metric. It’s about having broad strategy that ties to broad business goals.

A marketing conductor in the AI orchestra, where being specialised in a single instrument is no longer important. Orchestrating how everything comes together is. Having an ear for the one violin that’s out of tune is a real skill.

A relentless perfectionist who is unrepentant about making the AI do it again until it is right. Near enough is never good enough when it’s so much easier to get it exactly right.

An expert AI wrangler, who can comprehensively lay out the boundaries and areas of interest and can ensure the AI tools are accounting for the subtleties that it would otherwise miss.

A data whisperer who understands what AI spits out but can see beyond the numbers.

A cultural anthropologist who knows what makes people tick and how to create moments that feel human in an AI-driven landscape.

An ethical watchdog who ensures marketing doesn’t accidentally destroy trust in the pursuit of engagement.

 A ROI wizard who knows that all of this doesn’t happen for free. Time and money are important, both your own, and in the attention span of your customers. In a world where you can execute any campaign, at any time, making the right choices becomes important. Choosing not to clutter the space and not to do something because you are accounting for the opportunity cost of not doing something else becomes critical.

What does this mean for the CMO of 2025?

The marketing team as you know it today is going to change in every conceivable way. The amount of effort and budget you have committed to operationalising your marketing ideas will change dramatically. So will the ideas themselves. The skills you will need to achieve the best outcomes are going to shift radically.

Everyone in your team will become the equivalent of today’s CMO for their brand. Relieved from the operational drudgery of trying to make things work, the focus will shift from the operational towards the strategic. Having a broad-based understanding of the entire marketing landscape becomes more important. Analytics, personalisation, media production, media planning and buying that form the bulk of today’s marketing operations will be a thing of the past. Execution, once the big marketing challenge will take second place to ideation and conceptualisation.

You will have fewer people, and you’ll be spending more on technology. However, the individual technology tools will become less important. What will be more important is how those tools work together. Some tech vendors will offer the monolithic, do-it-all suites of technology, but AI orchestration will mean this becomes less important. Selecting the pieces of technology that work for you and bringing them all together seamlessly will be far more important.

As for you, the CMO, you’re going to be responsible for more. It’s already happening.  The scope of marketing responsibility is rapidly broadening, from top of funnel, through to ecommerce, sales and customer service. As you demonstrate your platform can successfully turn concepts into reality, it will stretch beyond the traditional sphere of marketing. It will enable the full customer experience lifecycle and touchpoints.

Five years is not a long time to bring about this change. CMOs who want to be ready for this future are starting now. They're looking at how they can make their marketing teams ready for the change. How they can prepare their marketing operations for automation. They're looking at how skills will need to evolve and how they can develop their own people and look for new skills. The successful marketing team of the future is not waiting for it all to happen organically.

Final thoughts

Marketing in 2029 will be a game of balance. AI will handle the grunt work, but the real magic will come from the humans who dare to be unpredictable, emotional, and just a little bit chaotic. Because at the end of the day, marketing isn’t just about optimising engagement rates - it’s about making people feel something. Because for consumers, things will change too. The low engagement decisions, such as which brand of rubbish bag to buy will be handed off to AI agents. Consumers will place more emphasis on engaging in the things that are meaningful to them.

The future of marketing is happening right now, and ironically, the most valuable skill might just be the one AI will never master: being human.