Thinking of Cutting Entry-Level Marketing Roles?
Thinking of cutting your entry-level marketing positions? Not sure what your marketing department should look like now that AI has entered the picture?
Listen, I get it. AI is impressive. It can do a lot of things fast. Sometimes it’s incredibly useful. Other times it’s not even mediocre. And every now and then, it completely blows my mind. Right now, it still feels a bit like the wild west. And if you’re changing your hiring strategy or redesigning your team based on a wild-west mentality, the results are going to be short-lived, uneven, and hard to trust.
Business owners are asking smart questions right now. Should we hire in-house? Outsource everything? Bring in one person who knows how to use AI tools and automate as much as possible?
Those are fair questions. But there’s one mistake I think businesses need to avoid: treating AI as a substitute for human marketing talent.
AI will absolutely reshape marketing work. It already is. But long-term success still depends on experienced marketers, emerging professionals learning alongside them, and thoughtful team design that blends human judgment with technological efficiency.
I recently posted a comment about this on LinkedIn that the mistakes, lessons, experiments, and real-world feedback we get early in our careers are a big part of what makes us valuable later. That has certainly been true for me. The reason I’m good at what I do now is not because I got everything right early on. It’s because I had leaders and mentors who pushed me, challenged me, corrected me, and gave me room to grow. I was also given freedom to teach myself new tools, test ideas, and sometimes push back on the very people I was learning from.
That combination matters. It’s how discernment is built. It’s how judgment is formed. And it’s how a profession stays strong.
Not every marketing role can be outsourced
There are some marketing roles that are simply better in-house. That person is closer to the team, can pivot quickly, can reliably keep the work moving, and understands the culture and priorities firsthand. Think about the work that needs daily access, constant context, or close collaboration with other departments: posting the latest product photography as new inventory comes in, supporting repurchase and retention efforts alongside sales or customer service, or creating technical materials and proposals for a busy B2B sales team.
That kind of work often benefits from proximity. It benefits from knowing the people, the pace, and the product.
Not every marketing role should be in-house, either
Other marketing roles are often better left to outsourced partners, freelancers, fractional leaders, or consultants. These people are valuable when you need specialized expertise, objective perspective, or focused momentum. They can help solve big problems, direct the marketing ship, lead a transition, or move a specific initiative forward faster.
Think about the moments when a business needs a stronger point of view than it currently has in-house: a marketing leader to refocus the team on the right priorities, a branding expert after an acquisition or ownership change, a digital strategist when technology shifts, or a researcher who can evaluate a new market opportunity and bring real data into the decision-making process.
This is where business owners can get tripped up. They assume the answer has to be one or the other: in-house or outsourced, people or AI, experience or affordability.
In reality, the strongest marketing functions are usually built as a blend.
Why replacing in-house or outsourced talent with AI is short-sighted
No matter which way you go, cutting entry-level positions wholesale in favor of using AI tools for work they do is short-sighted. It’s also a flag that you’ve been underutilizing entry-level talent. That’s not a dig; it’s a reality we all have to reckon with, myself included.
You are still going to need people 5-10 years from now who understand the fundamentals of marketing, consumer behavior, brand positioning, technology capabilities, and market shifts. Yes, their tasks will look different because of AI. Yes, the tools will keep changing. But they still need to learn how to think, how to evaluate, how to get a team on board, how to make decisions, how to pivot, and how to lead. That does not happen in a vacuum, and it does not happen by removing the process that makes them good at all of that.
Entry-level roles are not just about getting low-level work done. They are part of how businesses build future capability.
If businesses stop creating space for emerging marketers to learn from experienced ones, they are not just saving money in the short term. They are weakening their future bench. They are choosing immediate output over long-term capacity. And eventually, that decision catches up with them.
The roles may change, but the development still matters
I do think businesses should rethink marketing roles and responsibilities in light of AI. That would be foolish to ignore. Entry-level marketers may spend less time drafting from scratch and more time refining, prompting, analyzing, organizing, repurposing, QA-ing, and coordinating. Experienced marketers may spend less time on raw production and more time on direction, evaluation, coaching, decision-making, and cross-functional leadership.
That shift is real.
But rethinking the work is different from removing the people.
We’ve worked with students and new grads for a long time, and yes, they have different expectations than they did 10 years ago. As leaders, we need to do a better job of adapting to that reality because we still need them. In my experience, they are eager to learn, they want to contribute to something meaningful, and they often bring ideas I never would have come up with on my own.
That is not a threat to experienced marketers. That is part of what keeps a team sharp and keep the business in the game for the long haul.