Sometimes I switch my LinkedIn feed from Most recent posts to Most relevant posts (Recommended), which I don't actually recommend. Most recent gives you posts from your connections and the people you follow, with the occasional Suggested post from some rando. Most relevant is mostly Suggested posts from a slew of randos.
Whenever I do flip it, I remember within about ten seconds why I never leave it that way. My feed is full of marketers doing one of two things: offering generic platitudes or complaining about something.
The platitudes are easy enough to scroll past. So-called thought leaders have been recycling them for decades. (Lead with empathy. Meet your customer where they are. Authenticity wins. etc. etc. etc.)
The complaining is more interesting.
If you'd asked any marketer five years ago to list their professional frustrations, a lot of the answers would have come back the same: marketing is treated like an arts and crafts department, and nobody understands that asset creation is actually a small part of what marketing is. It’s been a foundational complaint, and an entirely legitimate one, for as long as I’ve been doing marketing.
I've made that exact argument myself, more than once.
But open LinkedIn today, using the aforementioned annoying feed settings, and the complaint has flipped. It’s not a majority of marketers, but many are warning that A.I. is going to be so disruptive to marketing specifically because of its ability to create assets quickly and at scale.
These can’t both be true.
If asset creation was a small enough part of the discipline that it was insulting to be defined by it, then A.I. getting good at asset creation should be a footnote. We'd shrug and say something like, "Great, that frees us up to do the actual work" — especially because for most companies most of the time, generative A.I. can absolutely deliver marketing assets that are good enough.
(Have you ever seen a car commercial? Or a fragrance ad? They are all identical. A.I. can definitely do that.)
But if A.I. taking over asset creation instead represents an existential threat to marketing, then asset creation was apparently a significant part of the actual work this whole time.
The research, for what it's worth, points fairly clearly in one direction. An Anthropic Economic Index report estimated that 65% of tasks performed by "market research analysts and marketing specialists" are exposed to A.I. (although it doesn’t specifically call out creative asset development). A 2025 systematic review in Discover Artificial Intelligence analyzed 381 peer-reviewed articles on AI in marketing published between 2021 and 2025 and identified "generative AI applications in digital content creation—including research addressing AI-generated text, imagery, and creative automation in marketing communication” as one of five dominant research themes.
So if we're being honest: yes, creating assets has been a much bigger part of the day-to-day than we like to claim when we're trying to look important. The "marketing is more than an arts and crafts department" line had real merit. Marketing does include strategy, audience definition, channel planning, brand stewardship, KPI accountability, and all the rest.
The line was also selectively true. We used it to assert our unique creative abilities in order to be protective about who could and couldn’t come up with copy and design.
We're allowed to argue that marketing is more than asset creation, or we're allowed to argue that A.I. taking over asset creation is the end of marketing. We're not allowed to argue both.
The constructive version of all this isn't complicated. If we want marketing taken seriously as a discipline (and we keep saying we do), then we have to actually do the disciplined parts: define the scope, set the KPIs, build the campaigns with intent, run the program with the same operational rigor as any other business function. If A.I. takes over the bulk of the asset production, fine. That makes the disciplined work easier to see, not harder — and our value more evident, not opaque.
The version where we use A.I. as an excuse to start the same complaint cycle with a new villain is not great. It's mostly what I'm seeing on LinkedIn, though, which is probably why I should go back to Most recent posts.
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