Is AI actually replacing marketing jobs?
Short answer
It is replacing marketing tasks, which over a few years amounts to a large number of jobs built mostly from those tasks. Producing volume — variants, briefs, first drafts, keyword clusters, reporting — has collapsed in cost. Judgement about what to say, to whom, and why anyone should care has not. The roles disappearing fastest are the ones that were mostly production.
The longer version
The honest version is that it is replacing marketing tasks, and a lot of marketing jobs were mostly a bundle of those tasks. Producing volume has collapsed in cost — ad variants, first drafts, briefs, keyword clusters, reporting, social scheduling. If your role was largely producing that volume, the ground has genuinely moved.
What has not collapsed is judgement: deciding what to say, working out who actually cares, knowing which of forty generated options is the one a real person would respond to, and understanding why last quarter's approach stopped working. Those require taste and context, and the tools are not close on either.
The uncomfortable middle is that judgement is hard to demonstrate on a CV, and easy to demonstrate on a product. Which is a large part of why experienced marketers are looking at equity in small products rather than another salaried role — it is a way of being paid for the judgement rather than the production.
The full argument, with the rest of the picture around it:
Your Marketing Career Was Training For This