Throughout my feeds I see the alarm bells, “AI is coming for your job!” We see virtually every marketing and sales role threatened by AI (though some of the research doesn’t show this). There are thoughtful articles in major newspapers about the impact of AI on jobs and work. In the past week, we’ve seen alarming reports about unemployment caused by AI. Fewer entry level jobs, even the CEO of Anthropic said, “AI could be coming after my job.”
I think what we are missing is not that the job market is vanishing, being displaced by agents and robots. Instead, the job market is morphing.
Of course, certain jobs will be eliminated, but we aren’t talking about all the new jobs that will be created. We aren’t talking about what new skills, capabilities, opportunities that might exist. Our context for looking at this is flawed. We are judging everything in the context of the jobs we have always done. We aren’t thinking of the future and the opportunities that are created. While I have abused this metaphor, Wayne Gretsky’s famous, “Skate to where the puck is going, not to where it is,” is important in framing our thinking of what do jobs look like in an AI world?
What we are seeing is not new, but because it impacts so many “business professionals,” we are more concerned, possibly outraged. But let’s look back in history. Tractors and related technologies revolutionized farming. Farm jobs evaporated because rather than one person and a plow horse farming 10s of acres, the tractors enabled that person to farm 100s to 1000s of acres. Those lost jobs went to other industries and parts of the economy.
Likewise, when we saw assembly lines, mass production, and robots replacing artisans, jobs moved into other parts of the economy. And with computers we saw the same things. Many clerical jobs were eliminated, but jobs moved into other parts of the economy.
And we’ve seen it in so many other areas. Technology and other advances change how we work, change our jobs, or eliminate our jobs. But somehow employment keeps building, new jobs are created. We won’t be sitting at home scrolling through Tik Tok feeds and wondering what to do with our time.
With AI, we will and should expect to see jobs eliminated. We will and should expect to see how we work change. But continuing to focus on the “woe are we,” stories, we must focus on, “What opportunities does this create? What new jobs must be done because AI can’t do them? What skills, knowledge, experience do we need to fill those jobs and perform at the highest level possible?”
While AI may solve lots of problems, create lots of efficiencies; new things will emerge. What are the new challenges created by AI? What are the new challenges we discover because we have not had the time to consider them? We’ve seen this with every single disruption through human history (Look at Yuval Harari’s books to trace this back millennia). Human beings have remarkable resilience, imagination, creativity in looking at what’s next.
We’ve seen some very thoughtful pieces on what this means for “entry level jobs.” Many say, “entry level jobs are disappearing, what does this mean for mid level jobs?” What I think much of this misses is that entry level jobs are changing, what are those new entry level jobs–and they exist across all functions and all industries?
Why do we think in terms of “What does this mean to SDRs, BDRs, AEs, AMs, marketing/content generators, sales ops/sales enablement, managers?” We need to shift our thinking, “What are the things AI isn’t doing, how do we build our skills and capabilities to do these things?”
I suspect one of the reasons we are so alarmed about this in sales and marketing roles is we have spent the last 10 years redesigning our engagement strategies to create greater distance from the customers, the human beings we want to engage. Rather than being deeply engaged in what they do, what they care about, how they think, we’ve distance ourselves, with carefully orchestrated playbooks and scripts. In many ways, we’ve designed things to minimize, rather than maximize human engagement.
As we look at what we want our SDRs/BDRs to do, we want them to follow the script/playbook. We aren’t asking them to think critically, to analyze, to deeply understand, to engage in collaborative conversations. We’ve done the same with so many other roles. What we have done everything we can do to reduce the human to human connection between each other and our customers. As a result, we have designed engagement processes that are optimized to be displaced by AI.
Likewise, we changed management jobs. Rather than focusing on developing and coaching people, they became report jockeys. We designed them to spend time doing endless performance analysis (which they do poorly) looking at charts with green, yellow, red lights. Their jobs have become, “fix the red, yellow lights.” We have designed managers jobs to be replaced by AI.
So we are getting what we designed and optimized for. And AI is the answer for a huge amount of this.
But there is massive reason for optimism!
Our designs are failing at accelerating rates (and this is before AI).
And if we take the time to listen to our customers, we find what they are asking for, the things they most value, and where we can best help them are things that AI doesn’t do–at least by itself. AI can support us and our customers in doing these things, but the core issues are uniquely human driven.
The sales, marketing, customer service, leadership jobs of the future will look different. They will be the jobs that AI can’t do. They will be supported by and with AI, but they are uniquely human, people to people, context heavy, purpose heavy, agile and creative in the moment. They are relationship focused.
We need to be looking forward thinking, what new jobs does this create? What are the entry level jobs? What are the career paths and more senior jobs? What are the jobs of leaders? They will look different than they look now!
Will there be as many entry and other sales, marketing, customer service jobs in 5 years as there are now? I don’t know. I don’t think we know enough about what this new future looks like. But I think there is reason for optimism about the future, I think the total employment in our GTM has some potential to increase. There are two reasons for this. I have not begun to address the brand new GTM related jobs created by AI. We have already seen jobs that we have never imagined in the past. Prompt engineers, model builders and behavior analysts, AI psychologists (ChatGPT and Claude have problems that require them to seek a couch and counseling), data cleansing, human validation/refinement, tool integrators, workflow designers, bias auditors, and others.
So, perhaps more harshly than I mean, Get Over It! You are doing a job of the past! It is irrelevant, unimportant!
Again, think to the past. How many switchboard operators, or typing pools, or keypunch operators, or darkroom technicians/photodevelopers, or gas station attendants are there these days? Where did those displaced workers go–they didn’t go home to sit on the couch!
The critical issue each of us must think about: What are the sales, marketing, customer service, leadership jobs of the future, a future in which AI has a huge place? What are the skills we need to develop personally? What are the skills, roles we need to develop for the future? How do we recruit, onboard, train, develop, and coach people to do these jobs? What does it take to have entry level capability in these jobs? What does it take to advance and develop to the most senior contributors in these jobs.
What are you doing to prepare yourselves and your organizations for these new jobs, which leverage the great power of AI, to drive growth for the future?
Afterword: Here is the AI discussion of this article. Enjoy!
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