Is AI Coming for Marketing Jobs? 14,000 Ads Analysed

This is a recording of a live session from the GTM ANZ Community, featuring Luke Marshall (Marketing Recruitment Lead, Pointer Strategy) and Ricky Pearl (Founder, Pointer Strategy).

The Data: 14,000 Marketing Jobs, 4 Months, 1 Clear Signal

Luke Marshall and the Pointer team have been tracking every marketing job posted on LinkedIn in Australia since November 2025. Across 14,000+ postings, they mapped the most commonly requested skills — and then compared those skills against what AI can already do today.

The five most requested skills across all marketing roles:

Sounds about right for the industry. But dig one layer deeper and the picture changes fast.

Marketing Manager: The Top 5 Skills vs AI Reality

From approximately 1,200 marketing manager roles in the dataset, the five most requested skills are:

1. Data Analysis — Already Solved by AI

This was the number one requested skill. Historically, marketers spent days marshalling data across spreadsheets, Google Analytics, Looker Studio, and Power BI. Tools like Graphed and Claude Code can now ingest Google Tag Manager data, Google Analytics data, and other datasets — then produce analysis that used to take days in minutes.

You still need to make decisions with the data. But the manual labour of gathering and organising it? That's been automated.

2. Leadership — Evolving Fast

Team management and mentoring are evergreen. But if headcount shrinks and individuals can do more with less, the nature of leadership changes. The forward-leaning companies are already having their marketing leaders orchestrate agent teams — not just people teams.

3. CRM — Fundamentally Disrupted

CRM management is a hot topic in the GTM ANZ Community. The most accurate CRMs sit at 80–90% data quality. Most are at 40–50%. AI can now clean, enrich, and maintain CRM data at a level that makes the old "Salesforce admin" skill set increasingly redundant. Tools like Freckle and Tio offer enrichment capabilities that change what CRM competency even means.

4. Digital Marketing — SEO Leading the Charge

SEO is the marketing discipline most visibly leaning into AI. Practitioners can see competitors beating them using AI techniques, so adoption is self-reinforcing. Across the broader digital marketing spectrum — lead generation, paid ads, content production — AI is handling tasks that previously required junior specialists.

5. Campaign Management — Ripe for Automation

Planning, executing, and optimising campaigns across channels now has AI touchpoints at every stage. What used to require a copywriter, a designer, a media buyer, and a project manager can increasingly be orchestrated by one skilled operator with the right tools.

The Alarming Numbers: Less Than 0.5% Require AI

Here's the stat that should wake up every hiring manager:

SEO roles had the highest AI mention rate — likely because you literally cannot compete in search without these tools anymore. But even growth marketing leads, where AI is essential to the job, barely reference it.

"You cannot do this job without AI. It is primarily a person leveraging tools to rip through the noise on the internet — because your competitors have AI, and without it you simply cannot compete." — Ricky Pearl

Growth Marketing Lead: A Case Study in Denial

From nearly 1,000 growth marketing lead postings in four months, the top requested skills — customer acquisition, experimentation, landing pages — all assume traditional execution methods. Yet:

One candidate Luke interviewed built an e-commerce brand from scratch to revenue-neutral in 10 months while job hunting — something impossible without AI tools. That's what top performers look like now.

What Top Performers Are Doing Differently

The gap between top performers and the middle of the market is widening:

Red Flags for Job Seekers

If you're evaluating companies, ask them:

As Ricky points out: if you're joining an organisation that isn't AI-forward, especially outside the blue-chip safety net, you're taking on significant career risk. Companies that aren't enabling their marketing teams with AI tools are holding both the team and themselves back.

The Opportunity for Startups

For early-stage companies, the AI gap is an advantage. Enterprises are constrained by procurement cycles, security reviews, and organisational inertia. A startup growth marketing lead with AI fluency can outperform entire corporate marketing teams.

But this window is closing. Enterprises are catching up. The alpha you get from AI adoption today won't last forever.

Key Takeaways

Your Speakers

Luke Marshall is the Marketing Recruitment Lead at Pointer Strategy. With 20 years in digital marketing and active involvement in the startup ecosystem, he helps hiring managers understand what AI-era marketing talent actually looks like.

Ricky Pearl is the Founder of Pointer Strategy, where he's worked with 200+ GTM teams in APAC on strategy, hiring, and implementation.

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<summary>Full Transcript</summary>

Ricky Pearl: He is, he is live.

Luke Marshall: Thanks Ricky. Hey. Hello everyone. I'm marshy, Luke Marshall if you want to talk to me formally. And pretty excited today to bring you a webinar with Pointer, which is — is AI coming for your marketing role?

My background and interest in this space has sort of carried over the last few years. Trained digital marketer over the last 20 years, active in the startup space. Like everyone else have noticed the advent of this transformational technology. I honestly believe that the majority of people and the majority of the market don't really know what's coming. Obviously I'm inside a bubble. I try and turn things away from hype.

But for today, really want to just focus it on marketing roles specifically. With the background and the role that I do at Pointer, which is marketing recruitment, and let the data show you what we're seeing and why it's alarming and probably what top performers are doing to sort of mitigate against this. And then where the opportunities are for both hiring managers, but also talent who perhaps are feeling maybe a bit left behind. It's very common and what they could do to help themselves.

From a big picture perspective, our market is stuck. This is an article recently in Ad Week from Mark Ritson. Most marketers will know who he is, and essentially Anthropic did a labour market study that said the majority of technical skills that white collars possess — development, web development, programming, but also professions like teaching and legal — these professions are largely in the crosshairs.

And because marketing is such a language centric role, it doesn't really have formal training. There's some accreditations you can get from technology companies. There's certainly degrees and studies you can do. But an open secret in the industry is when you hire a marketing grad, the amount of information that they take with them from the degree to that first job is largely not apart from the critical thinking skills.

So there's valid questions to be asking yourself as a marketer or someone hiring marketers. I just wanted to show data based on the work we have been doing at Pointer.

One part of this is okay, well it's interesting content. Another part is what are the trends over time? And what we've been doing since November is essentially looking at all the marketing jobs that are posted on LinkedIn. Looking for any trends and information about the position descriptions, types of roles, seniority, and been regularly releasing a report each month.

But today I actually just wanted to pull all that data and so from the jobs that have been posted over the last four months, the marketing jobs — we've got about 14,000 plus — and wanted to see what the skills that were being requested for in these roles, how frequently they were requested and look at a couple of roles in specifics.

This is what the market is asking for or advertising for. This is what we're seeing in AI world, and are they aligned or are they not?

Without jumping to AI to begin with, the most commonly requested skills — across all industries, all marketing roles — social media is number one, CRM number two, project management three, paid media four and stakeholder management five. And I'd say with my knowledge and being over 20 years in this industry, it sounds about right.

But what's this mean in terms of skills versus AI? What you're seeing on the screen is what are the most commonly requested skills for a marketing manager specifically. Of this data and of the roles I mentioned, the odd 14,000, this was around 1,200 marketing manager style roles, and from that 1,200 we've got the five most commonly requested skills.

Data analysis, obviously a huge one. It's very important to be able to absorb data, interpret data, use that data to make decisions and drive meaningful outcomes. But the amount of work this used to require pre-AI was nuts. Some of my first marketing roles were done within a spreadsheet. Buying media, extracting clicks, finding traffic and conversion data and basically marshalling it towards a goal.

Tools like Power BI and Looker Studio absolutely have helped with this in the past. I'd say Google Analytics Four makes it a bit harder to read the tea leaves than the earlier versions. But this is the most commonly requested skill for a marketing manager, and it's moot. This has been cracked and solved by generative AI tools. Graph is one out of the US, Filament Analytics — you can ingest your Google Tag Manager data, any other datasets and your Google Analytics data, or you can simply ask Claude Code to do this for you.

The amount of manual labour you need to do in order to extract and divine this data is minimal. You absolutely need to be able to make decisions with that data and I don't think that's going to be replaced anytime soon. The way you manipulate and make decisions and gather that data is completely different.

For example, this presentation with 14,000 jobs being gathered and the analysis being run — this could not have been done a couple of years ago. Yet the tools now enable this.

Leadership for a marketing manager is the second most requested skill. Obviously team management, mentoring, and there's no question leadership and being able to marshal a project through stakeholder management — this is a soft skill that will come in handy for life. But my challenge to this still is, if headcount is shrinking, what you can do — if you can do more with less — does that leadership still become something that's required of a marketing manager, or is it something that you need to be better at leading the agents and orchestrating the agents?

We are forward facing and working with early stage companies and also paying close attention to what is happening in US Tech in particular with go to market. The leaders in this space are absolutely leading agent teams and orchestrating these things — not what this skill is and how it's being described in the market today.

CRM is one that we enjoy debating in the Pointer GTM ANZ community. You can join it at pointerstrategy.com. These tools and softwares have often been a frustration for marketing teams for a very long time. I encourage you to do a bit of window shopping and look at a tool like Freckle or Tio. They both have generous free trials and put it through some enrichment capability.

CRMs today, the most accurate ones will have data that is 80 to 90% accurate. Most are sitting around the 40-50% mark at best, particularly with lots of old records. AI cleans this job up. It can enrich, you can ingest data, you can ask for these things — yet the skill of being able to manipulate or use a Salesforce or HubSpot is still being requested when today this has largely been solved in a different way with what AI's capabilities are. The market just hasn't caught up yet.

Digital marketing is a large discipline. What we're seeing in the data is that SEO is definitely the most forward facing and leaning into AI's capabilities. But across the gamut — lead generation and paid ads — paid ads can now today be exclusively managed by AI for outcomes that are comparable to what a junior paid ad specialist would be able to do.

Ricky Pearl: Could I jump in for a second here, Luke? Just on the stats, if anyone hasn't seen — less than half a percent of roles mentioned having AI as a required skill and less than 20% added it as a nice to have. But on SEO, that was the most forward, right? That was the highest amount.

And my question to you is, is that because this is what AI can do so well, or is it just because of what hiring managers are aware of what AI can do so well and they're catching up here?

Luke Marshall: It's definitely gaps, right? I think talking to SEO specifically for a second, you can't do your job without leaning into these tools because it's a competitive marketplace competing for various people's attention, and anyone who's doing their craft for longer than five minutes can see that other companies are beating them applying these techniques.

Ricky Pearl: And I guess AEO and GEO are such major topics in themselves that it's almost like it's crazy to talk about SEO and not talk about generative engines and answering an AI engine.

Luke Marshall: Yeah. And I think we've experimented with this at Pointer in setting up AEO skills and you know, Ricky, you're like Pointer's number one SEO specialist at the moment. You're getting outcomes from the traffic and we're seeing the numbers go up and to the right from our small start — by virtue of being a business owner that is looking to get gains in this area and being curious and leaning into the tech.

Coming back to the question about hiring managers and why this isn't perhaps being advertised or asked for in roles — there's a lag in understanding. If we look at any organisation with say a hundred employees plus, there's a lag between getting the role approved, going to market, and advertising the role. And the larger the organisation, the bigger that lag can be.

There's other factors like controls and tech and why you can't just throw caution to the wind and lean into AI. But the argument I want to make here is that if you are just accepting that as status quo, these roles and positions that you are hiring for are a ticking time bomb because they will — they're fundamentally changing as we speak.

On the amount of explicit mentions of AI — those numbers are horrific. Growth marketing lead actually doesn't differ very much from a marketing manager in terms of the top skills. But for reference, the roles we've hired for the most have been marketing manager and generally head of growth or growth marketing lead roles. And AI is not explicitly being called for.

But if we look at customer acquisition as one of the top differentiating skills for a growth marketer, you can't go after new cohorts and run experiments at scale and meet the demands of an organisation asking for a growth marketing lead without AI.

The lag in doing it the old fashioned way with writing landing pages, perhaps using landing page generator tools, briefing freelancers, writing the graphics, perhaps employing a copywriter in the past — that's what you would actually do. This is what the job ads are looking like for growth marketing people, yet all of what I just described can be done with Claude Code and by orders of magnitude cheaper.

And I don't know anyone who is sane and looking to hire a growth marketing lead at the early stage levels that isn't leaning into AI because the outsize advantage you can get is significant.

Coming back to the companies that we are competing with — in more mature markets, corporates, and the like, who aren't leveraging these tools — an early stage growth marketing lead can absolutely have a feast exploiting those advantages right now.

And I just want to talk Ricky about what the top performers are doing differently. We see this in interviews. The top performers are basically learning this stuff on the side, looking for their gains and leads. I spoke to a candidate who came from a big financial services business. While he was looking for work, set up an e-com brand from scratch and got it to revenue neutral and started to generate some cash flow within 10 months from scratch. He did not have that skill. You cannot do this without AI, and the best people are actually leaning into those capabilities.

Ricky Pearl: Now, it's pretty damn shocking that so few growth marketing leads had AI as an explicit skill requirement on job ads. And we're talking across thousands of job ads here. You cannot do this job without AI.

Luke Marshall: Almost a thousand in the last four months, Ricky.

Ricky Pearl: You cannot do this job without — like, this is an AI job now. It is primarily a person leveraging all of these tools to rip through the amounts of noise on the internet because your competitors have AI, and without this you simply cannot compete.

Luke Marshall: Yeah. And I think top performers — experimenting, breaking things, posting. I'd say mid-level candidates — "Oh yeah, I use ChatGPT" — it's just a different language.

And if you're talent working out "what do I do here?" — the Ritson article had some great callouts. Your soft skills are always gonna be useful, so don't freak out yet. There may be jobs invented for people like you that are coming out. But the most urgent callout I can see is increasing your fluency.

We debate this in some of the communities we're active in, but how you learn it is less relevant than you can show what you are doing. A good example is I've got a friend Robbie who is running workshops and webinars teaching marketing departments how to use agents and setting up workflows — and she can showcase this work. As a senior marketer who is upskilled in this area, the time is still relatively early to what the market is demanding.

How you learn this stuff is up to you. There's podcasts, there's YouTube, there's just playing and trying to ship or trying to orchestrate something.

Coming back to the stats — this is from the February postings, and Ricky mentioned these numbers before, but more importantly, 80 to 99% of the roles out there in February are under-skilled, wasteful, or in denial about what you can do. That's how blunt and bleak it is. And I expect this data to catch up over time.

Ricky Pearl: And one other thought I just had — that 80% are in denial, but as importantly, if you are going into an organisation that is not AI forward, I'd be very concerned. If they're a big blue chip company, sure, maybe they'll weather the storm and catch up. But we've also just seen Block lay off 40% of their staff. Maybe they won't.

It's so important that you're looking for companies that have this in place, that are allowing marketers to use tools, that are giving — Nathan Clark spoke about this on the revenue enablement session last week — in revenue enablement, you need developer access now. The same way maybe only your IT team would've had access in the past. And it's the same for marketers.

At least 80% of companies are probably not enabling their marketing teams enough. How they can leverage AI and have access to the tools. And I think that's an important consideration for people on the market. You should be interrogating your companies. "How are you leveraging AI to get this done?" Because if they hadn't mentioned it in the job ad, there's some red flags.

Luke Marshall: It's a ripper question to throw through the selection process. "What have you done to upskill in AI as a company?" "Oh no, we have to use Gemini only" or "just Copilot because of this." These are flags. How can you be expected to do your job in a competitive marketplace with such strict parameters?

On the developer access — there's probably cyber professionals that would be shirking at such a thought. But there's not an exec in the country that is not thinking about AI and what impact it has on their business. It's one of the top three things that they're considering in terms of long-term impact.

So there seems to be a gap somewhere along the food chain in terms of the marketing function and what the execs are thinking that needs some illumination. I've followed this for a number of years, I've written about it, and the data isn't lying here.

Feel free to jump in with questions if you're on LinkedIn and the comments. But if you are curious and you're writing a current position description and want to know what can and can't be done with AI, please feel free to send it my way. I'll just record a quick Loom and tell you what I think. No pitch. I'm just here to help.

Ricky Pearl: Really great. Short, sharp, to the point. I think the takeaways for me here — companies need to be leaning into this. If you haven't got it in your last job description, maybe HR is not the right department to be hiring the marketing managers. Maybe they need to be looking at specialists now.

The actual marketing managers need to be staying on top of what's possible. Certainly as we've gotten comments from Jesse and Pasha in the chat, AI fluency is important because knowing current skills and current AI tools is also irrelevant in six months time. This has to be a "how do you stay on top of it, what are you doing" and creating environments where your team can do that.

There is risk management involved here. They need some sandboxed environments where they can test and push. They need some extra leeway where maybe they can do first and ask permission later. These are parts of the problems holding companies back and holding candidates back if they can't explore.

And like Jesse mentioned, side projects — if you can't do this at your company, just go build something. It is not a side hustle. I'm not saying start a new career. But if you're not tinkering with this, you're falling behind at a rapid rate.

Luke Marshall: A hundred percent. Leaving money on the table and leaving opportunities on the table too.

Ricky Pearl: And every startup in particular — at that enterprise stage, this alpha that we're calling the alpha — the differential in your go-to-market, in your revenue engine, based on leveraging the most sophisticated tools relative to an enterprise that has to wait until things are mainstream — you need that alpha. You need the beta. You need every little piece of advantage that you can get to get ahead.

So now is the time, literally now, because they're catching up. The big enterprises. So all good Marshy, thank you for that. Any questions? Marshy is really the person who's leading the charge in Australia, knows this better than anyone. Helping hiring managers build the right plans or how they can leverage AI and then find the right people who can fill that, and helping to keep those people upskilled and in the know so that they never fall behind. From go to woe — that's the whole service here.

And Jesse, Pasha, everyone in the chat that's asked questions — thank you very much. Let's take this all offline into the GTM ANZ community chat and keep the conversation going there.

Luke Marshall: Thanks guys. Awesome chat today. Thank you.

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*This session is part of the weekly GTM ANZ Community series. Join free for conversations on marketing, revenue enablement, partnerships, and AI — every Thursday.*