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(This year, I'm devoting some of my Research Round-Up posts to a discussion of academic research papers relating to the use of artificial intelligence - specifically generative AI applications - in marketing. This post features an unpublished paper that provides an early look at the impact generative AI may have on marketing employment.)The potential impact of generative artificial intelligence on the number of marketing jobs has been vigorously discussed in marketing circles since the public debut of ChatGPT in November 2022.
Some marketing thought leaders have argued that the capabilities of generative AI applications are advancing so rapidly that it's almost inevitable some marketing jobs will be eliminated.
Other commentators maintain that AI applications cannot possess the emotional intelligence required to create marketing content that will be effective with potential buyers, and therefore human marketers will always be needed.
One of my go-to resources for anything relating to artificial intelligence is Christopher Penn, the co-founder and chief data scientist at Trust Insights. Penn says that some companies will see the improved productivity created by AI as an opportunity to reduce costs, and they will eliminate marketing jobs that become "unnecessary." Other companies will view the increased productivity as an opportunity to expand the capabilities of their marketing function, and they will have their human marketers take on new tasks.
The reality is that it's impossible to know with certainty what impact AI will have on the overall number of marketing jobs. However, a recent paper by three academic researchers provides an early indication of what the impact of AI might look like.
Here are the paper's details:
- Authors - Ozge Demirci, Harvard Business School; Jonas Hannane, German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin) and Technische Universitat Berlin; and Xinrong Zhu, Imperial College London Business School
- Date Written - October 15, 2023
Study Objectives and Methods
This paper describes the results of an analysis of job posts on a leading global online freelancing platform. The objective of the analysis was to identify the short-term impact of generative AI applications on the demand for freelance jobs in online labor markets.
The analysis included a total of 1,388,711 job posts that appeared on the freelancing platform from July 2021 to July 2023. So, the analysis period included approximately 17 months before, and about eight months after, the public release of ChatGPT.
The authors used a clustering algorithm to identify clusters of skills that frequently appeared together in job posts. Then they mapped each job post to the cluster with the greatest similarity in skills. This enabled the researchers to place the job posts in a manageable number of groups by type of job.
The authors focused their analysis on eight of the most prevalent types of jobs, which they grouped into three broad categories.
- Manual intensive jobs - those that require a large proportion of manual tasks
- Automation prone jobs - those involving tasks that are susceptible to digitalization or automation
- Image generating jobs - those that primarily involve the creation of visual content and 3D models
The final breakdown of jobs included in the analysis was:
- Manual intensive jobs
- Data and office management
- Video Services
- Audio services
- Automation prone jobs
- Writing
- Software, app, and web development
- Engineering
- Image generating jobs
- Graphic design
- 3D modeling
Writing and graphic design jobs are primarily marketing jobs, and the analysis revealed that generative AI applications had a substantial impact on the demand for those jobs.
The researchers found that the demand for writing jobs decreased by 30.37% more than the demand for manual intensive jobs within eight months after the public release of ChatGPT. The analysis also revealed that the release of AI text-to-image generators (such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E) led to an 18.49% decrease in the number of job posts for graphic design services, relative to manual intensive jobs.
Caveat
This paper provides an interesting perspective regarding the potential impact of generative AI applications on marketing employment, but I would be surprised if the findings described in the paper extend much beyond the freelance market.
I tend to agree with Christopher Penn that some companies will take advantage of generative AI efficiencies to cut costs, while others will use generative AI as a lever of growth.
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