These are the 5 Marketing Roles AI Makes Critical
The AI playbook for marketing is being written in real time. Here are the 5 roles that matter.
AI is going to change marketing drastically; there are very few marketers who'd disagree with that.
There's a lot of fear about how AI disrupts marketing and what marketing jobs get disrupted by AI, but the opposite is also true.
AI will create new roles for marketers and make existing roles much more critical. In this post, I want to cover some of the roles I feel will be critical to a modern-day marketing team running an AI playbook.
Note: This post is shorter than normal as I'm meant to be on holiday this week. Stay tuned for future posts like 'The AI Marketing Playbook for 2026' and my personal favourite 'Vibe Prompting'.
The Marketing Roles for an AI Playbook
1. AI Engineer:
A new role for marketing, not your typical engineer, but a key hire to truly take advantage of AI. The AI engineer is the person obsessed with AI, a systems thinker who can start to integrate AI across your human-led marketing workflows.
Core Skills: Technical enough to build with Replit, Lovable. Knows their way around n8n, Zapier, Gumloop, and AI assistants like ChatGPT/Claude. Is a systems thinker and is passionate about marketing. Can build AI apps and AI workflows.
Why It Matters: One of the biggest blockers I see for marketing in accelerating AI adoption across their team is the inability to go really deep with AI to automate a lot of their most important work. You need technical skills, depth of AI knowledge and systems thinking. That’s where the AI engineer helps.
Example in Action: Think of being able to integrate your comm channels like email, slack, GDrive into your AI assistant (Claude, OpenAI, Gemini) and build a library of prompts for people to be able to automate all their status updates.
2. AI Trainer:
A new role for marketing, and likely one most companies won't need for 12+ months, but it's coming. As you deploy more agents across your GTM, you'll need someone skilled at training those agents. I've seen this firsthand. An agent that sells on your website, an agent that does the first 30 days onboarding, and an agent that upsells paying customers. All need training, iteration, and feedback.
Core Skills: Great at prompt design, setting feedback loops, and fine-tuning agents for specific use cases e.g. would need to understand sales, customer support etc to train the agent.
Why It Matters: Badly trained agents wreck trust across your customer journey.
Example in Action: We've trained multiple agents for specific use cases, each time we've had to go through a lengthy training process and continual refinements.
3. AEO (AI Engine Optimisation):
Likely an evolution of the SEO team, but all companies will need a skilled AI Engine Optimisation Team. Today, 80% of the buyer's journey begins with a Google search; tomorrow, it starts with a question in an LLM. It's a new skill to learn: page optimisation for AI engines, how to get cited within trusted sources that AI engines rely on (hello PR), and how to engage with communities like Reddit.
Core Skills: Understands how AI engines surface answers. Can structure content, feed the right signals, and test prompts until your brand shows up in answers. Can get citations in the right trusted sources.
Why It Matters: "Page 1 of Google" has become "the default answer in ChatGPT." If you're not showing up, you won’t exist.
Example in Action: We spun out an AEO team very early, and we've seen huge increases in visibility across ChatGPT and other LLMs.
4. Creator-Led Content Manager:
The person building your team of creators (internal/external) to build influence for your ideal customer profile. Today, most B2B companies are set up to do traditional brand content. But, we're seeing people in B2B gravitate towards creators vs brands. A trend we saw many years ago, and it is the core reason we bought theHustle in 2021. Today, we generate more demand through these creator-led channels compared to traditional brand channels. Crazy! This trend is going to accelerate because of AI. People will want to consume content from people not brands.
Core Skills: Spot the right voices in your niche, be able to hire some, building partnerships with others. Give them quality production using a collection of AI tools, and understand how to interlink the creators to increase visibility for the entire network.
Why It Matters: People will follow people, not brands, even in B2B
Example in Action: We generate more demand from creator-led channels vs. brand-led channels.
5. Intent Signal Strategist
AI is a BOOM for intent signals. Plus, as marketers, we're going to get much less traffic, so we need to extract more from what we get. We'll do that by being more proactive (reaching potential buyers before competitors) and creating tailored experiences for a smaller subset of our audience. That's your intent signal strategy. You need an A+ player to uplevel how intent is used across your buying journey.
Core Skills: Combines GTM tools, product analytics, site behavior, social listening, and external scraping. Uses AI to stitch it all together into something useful.
Why It Matters: If you can see intent early, you can act before competitors even know the buyer exists and tailor the experience to increase conversion rates.
Example in Action: We've seen upwards of 500% increases in conversion rates where we've combined intent signals + personalization via AI.
That’s a quick summary of my thinking on what roles become more critical as you start to adopt an AI playbook for marketing.
Stay tuned as I’ll send that entire AI playbook in a future post that connects to these roles.
Until Next Time
Happy AI’fying
Kieran