A troubling trend is developing involving AI and early-career marketers, and I’m not the only one noticing it.

Leading voices like Paul Roetzer highlighted attention-grabbing quotes from Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, who predicted AI could wipe out roughly 50 percent of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. 

Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab produced the first long-term research focused on AI’s impact on early-career jobs. It referred to young, entry-level workers as the “canaries in the coal mine,” a declaration made after analyzing data from ADP, the largest U.S. HR/payroll software provider. 

Today’s early-career workers (ages 22–25) are the first major wave of graduates to emerge after 2022’s ChatGPT moment. The Stanford report concluded that early workers experienced a 16% relative decline in employment, while employment among more experienced workers remained stable.

It didn’t used to be this way

During my 20-year career at GE, I served on the volunteer campus recruiting team. That team consisted of passionate alumni from schools GE targeted for entry-level grads (in my case, University of Wisconsin-Madison). These volunteers sponsored student organizations and partnered with faculty to hire the best and brightest students.

GE’s entry-level leadership development program was well known. It was the company’s leadership pipeline and required a significant investment in early-career training. Those leaders then paid it forward to other grads because they knew well the program’s impact on the organization’s long-term health.

After 30 years in corporate leadership, I returned to campus as a lecturer focused on digital marketing and marketing strategy. I started teaching in 2023, giving me a front-row seat to genAL and its impact on college students.  While I feel we are doing everything we can to prepare these graduates with new AI-infused teaching methods, the impact is still unprecedented.

In my upcoming articles for MarTech, I plan to dive deeper into this issue. This is a call to action within my network. I’m partnering with marketing and martech leaders, as well as higher ed leaders. We need much more discussion on this topic, including both corporate and agency leaders.

In my upcoming pieces, I’ll be exploring: 

• Transparency: We need to be open to saying the quiet parts out loud.
• Marketing jobs and tasks that make the impacts immediate.
• The martech paradox.
• A roadmap to start taking action.

The data paints an ugly picture for early career marketers

At first glance, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) report that rated the 2026 job market as “fair” was good news. Flat hiring doesn’t sound as gloomy as layoffs, but digging deeper into the report produced a clearer picture. The year 2025 was a significantly down year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the U.S. economy added only 181,000 jobs in 2025, more than 1 million fewer than in 2024. We need more growth to support new graduates.

A series of high-profile AI-driven layoffs across multiple sectors this year appears to be the tip of the spear. Many in the job market are sitting still, reducing the pool of opportunities for entry-level candidates. Because companies are hiring more cautiously (and likely using AI to drive productivity), there will simply be fewer opportunities. Whether it’s completely “AI washing” or not, it’s happening; no market experts are predicting a reversal, only an acceleration.

Most importantly, the broader narrative of AI’s impact on jobs always focuses on replacements and layoffs. New graduates can’t be replaced if they were never hired in the first place. We must be willing to say these quiet parts out loud and explain these broader impacts to entry-level candidates so they know the reality.

I recently spoke at an event sponsored by a student organization. During that talk, and in 1:1 chats afterward, several students said they appreciated understanding why this is happening. This is a much different job market that graduates faced coming out of the financial crisis in 2008. While painful, that was more restricted to certain markets and disciplines and a bounce-back was more predictable.

Think of marketing jobs as marketing tasks

The voices I trust most in this space are Roetzer and Mike Kaput from the Marketing AI Institute and SmarterX. What I value most is their willingness to be transparent, even if they often don’t like what they’re saying. On their weekly podcast, they point out that the “gap between what AI can do and what entry-level workers have typically been asked to do” has effectively narrowed to zero. 

Roetzer openly discloses that even as SmarterX is growing rapidly, he is struggling to find roles for entry-level workers, even though he wants to hire them. He owned a marketing agency for 16 years and was HubSpot’s first agency client. 

When asked whether certain role types are being rapidly impacted by AI in a recent AI Answers podcast, Roetzer said, “If you were just executing (building landing pages, writing copy, etc.), you’re cooked. That is not a job one to two years out. I want to create job opportunities for students straight outta college. I don’t know what they are now.”

Roetzer said AI is not just temporarily disrupting these roles; it’s completely redefining them. 

He also discussed a framework that breaks down historical jobs as a container for a series of tasks. 

Specifically, Roetzer recommends putting any traditional job role description into a custom GPT he built called JobsGPT. It breaks jobs down into a series of tasks to assess the job’s exposure level to AI’s capabilities. It’s striking to see it laid out this way. I’ve tried it using multiple examples, and you can literally see why it’s going to impact jobs.

Roetzer’s team also launched a Marketing AI industry council, which commissioned an overall AI Impact report. That report concluded that within one to two years “AI model advancements and agent capabilities will force a radical transformation of marketing talent, teams and organizational structures.

Marketing managers are also likely feeling the pressure. They are often the leaders charged with hiring and training entry-level marketers. Julie Bedard, a Boston Consulting Group managing partner, is leading various research efforts on how AI will transform the workforce. She and her team are using models to predict which jobs would change the most, stating on the most recent episode of the Hard Fork Podcast that “a marketing manager’s [tasks] are 90% disrupted from a skill perspective.”

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The martech paradox

We also need to address the role martech leadership needs to play in this disruption.  For more than 15 years, this space has fueled the growth of martech as a career path. The growth of marketing technology and operations from organizational misfits to strategic advisers and operators was an incredible journey. We were the early adopters and often led the AI adoption charge at respective organizations, either in-house or as part of agencies/consultancies.  

Although martech fueled its own concerns about job replacement as it matured, for the most part, it was a net positive because it had also fueled the growth of a completely new category of jobs. If the martech community fails to take a leadership role in addressing this, we will also be seen as one of the causes of this talent crisis.

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