Which marketing role will be extinct in five years?

AI adoption faces organizational resistance despite clear competitive advantages. David Rabin, CMO at Lenovo Solutions & Services Group, explains how marketers can navigate transformation barriers. He identifies "order taker" roles as most vulnerable to AI replacement while emphasizing that adopters versus laggards will determine career survival. Rabin advocates for using AI as a copilot to expand role scope and building agents that work in your style rather than resisting technological change. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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  Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.

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  I'm Benjamin Shapiro and joining me today is David Rabin, the Chief Marketing Officer at Lenovo's Solutions and Services Group, which helps companies build right-size AI solutions. And today, David is going to share how you can overcome organizational barriers that are blocking your AI adoption. All right, which marketing roles do you think will be extinct in the next five years?

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  I wish I knew the actual answer to that because it would help me with my organizational planning, but there's a role that we think about as order takers. There are people that sort of wait for a brief to land on their desk and then they start running and it could be a writer, it could be a designer, anybody that's sort of at the mercy of somebody else to get their work started. Those roles are going to be the first to go. You kind of said it on your own, imagine if you had a researcher. Six months ago, you would have said, hey, I need you to do some research on David Rabin. Tell me everything you can find out about David Rabin, his speaking style, what his content. Companies up to how he writes, how he talks today in literally 15 minutes, you can get that done. So the order take a role is going to be phased out. If the order take a roles today can start figuring out ways to add value,

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  to add strategy, to be smarter on the marketplace, they might have a future. If not, we will start phasing those roles out yesterday.

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  I think of it a little bit of a different framework. And maybe the question led this direction where it's what roles? Our writer is going to be in trouble. Our researcher is going to be in trouble. Is the executive team going to be worthless? Can marketers do it all themselves? Who knows? I actually don't think it's an individual role. I think where the gap is going to be with adopters and laggards, where if you know how to use artificial intelligence effectively, you're going to have superpowers to expand your role, scope and effectiveness for your organization, you'll be incredibly more powerful and valuable. If you're just trying to do things the old way and you're a writer and you're sitting there and like, nope, got to use my typewriter. Can't use AI, got to write every word myself. You're a dinosaur. You're in trouble.

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  So to me, what's going to be extinct? It's not being enabled with the co-pilot next to you or not understanding how to build agents that can do the work that you want in your style for you. And we serve as more of the filtering mechanism and less of the operators.

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  Yeah, but even if you were to say, let's take our marketing hats off for one second. Okay, truck drivers, we rely on them to move goods around the country. What if those become all autonomous? We don't know. What about a radiologist who today we would say, wow, I mean, they're going to be kind of reading what's going on inside my body. But if tomorrow an AI tool can take over and say, we got this. We don't need to wait six hours or an hour for the radiologist. It's just going to do it real time. Even front desk workers, if you've walked into a fast food restaurant recently, the human interaction is almost gone because they want you to order at a kiosk. So there's all sorts of functions that they're the ones waiting for the thing to happen. Tell me to drive this truck from point A to point B. Here is this x-ray. Please read it. I would like to give you my order.

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  Any of those jobs that you're waiting for somebody to tell you what to do are ripe to be replaced by AI.

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  Undoubtedly, there will be industries that are totally disrupted. When I think of the role of marketing, right? A truck driver, yes, the trucking industry, when autonomous vehicles become commonplace, probably going to change pretty dramatically. When we think about the service workers and the idea and the creatives in marketing specifically, some marketers can do incredible things with very limited AI tools now. And in five years from now, when we've got more agentic services and superintelligence and God knows what is coming down the bike, you're going to have these people that really can do amazing, large-scale campaign creation, management, execution, evaluation using the

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  toolset, and that makes the need for the sort of order taker type role to be less important.

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  Yeah, and maybe what you're describing also is we're going to do more on our own. So just like today, we're sometimes more comfortable looking at our phone for hours on end than communicating with other people. You can imagine a workplace where some of the team dynamic starts to get fractured because more and more of the work I'm going to do, from the insights to the strategy to the content development to the publishing, might be done by me as opposed to a team of people. It can be quite interesting.

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  And that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks to David Rabin, the Chief Marketing Officer at Lenovo Solutions and Services Group, for joining us. If you'd like to contact David, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on martechpod.com, or you can visit his company's website, which is lenovo.com. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube, and we'll be back in your feed every week. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.

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