When AI Makes Your Job Easier, You'll Get More Work (Not Less)
Let me tell you the strange story of radiologists—because it reveals something profound about how AI will actually reshape marketing, not replace it.
Back in 2016, Geoffrey Hinton—Turing Award winner, godfather of AI—declared that we should stop training radiologists. "It's completely obvious," he said, "that within five years, deep learning is going to do better than radiologists."
Hinton is one of the pioneers of neural networks, someone who understood the emerging technology better than almost anyone. But he was spectacularly wrong.
Almost ten years later, demand for radiologists hasn't gone to zero. It's at an all-time high. This is despite dozens of state-of-the-art AI products that can detect and classify hundreds of diseases faster and more accurately than humans.
What happened?
The Paradox of Efficiency
When we gave radiologists tools that sped up one aspect of their job, demand for their services exploded. Cheaper scans meant more scans. More scans meant more demand for complex diagnosis, treatment planning, and the human judgment that only radiologists can provide.
This is what economists call Jevons Paradox. When technology pushes down the cost of using a resource, demand for that resource—and the services associated with it—skyrockets.
The principle was first observed in 1860s England, when economist William Stanley Jevons noticed that technological improvements in coal efficiency actually increased coal consumption across industries. It ran contrary to everyone's assumptions. More efficiency should mean less use, right? Wrong. Efficiency reveals latent demand. And new demand creates entirely new categories of work.
What This Means for Marketing
Think about what's happening in your world right now.
When containerization made shipping 90% cheaper in the 1960s, dock workers feared obsolescence. Instead, global trade exploded—creating billion-dollar empires in freight forwarding, logistics, and warehouse distribution.
When cloud computing made infrastructure 10x cheaper in the 2010s, server admins didn't disappear. They became DevOps engineers and cloud architects, managing infrastructure at scales previously unimaginable.
And right now? As AI pushes down the cost of inference, demand for GPUs hasn't cratered—it's skyrocketed. Nvidia stock just hit an all-time high.
Here's what this means for marketing: As AI makes it cheaper, faster, and easier to create content, analyze data, and automate campaigns, we should expect demand for marketing services to increase.
As Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, recently wrote: "When the cost of doing work goes down, the demand for it goes up. And usually there's far more pent-up demand than we realize."
The Work Is Changing, Not Disappearing
Does this mean jobs won't change? Of course not. Many roles will transform dramatically. What used to be manual execution will become supervising teams of AI agents. But humans will still be in the loop—just at a higher level.
Andre Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI, argues that AI will first transform jobs that are rote, require little context, and are forgiving of mistakes—customer service, data entry, basic content production. But even then, many of these jobs will be refactored into manager or supervisor roles rather than disappearing entirely.
AI still can’t entirely manage an end-to-end workflow. It misses context, makes mistakes, and needs guidance. It can certainly help though!
We're already seeing this play out. Customer service agents are becoming AI team managers. Admin roles are transforming from data entry to complex case management. Often these are the boring, soul-crushing tasks that suddenly become interesting when you're orchestrating an army of AI agents.
For marketers, this is good news. The tedious parts of your job—the endless reporting, the repetitive content creation, the manual data analysis—those are exactly the tasks AI will handle. What remains is the work that matters: strategy, storytelling, human connection, and the judgment calls that require context, creativity, and emotional intelligence.
What You Should Do Right Now
If you're building marketing strategies, campaigns, or movements in the age of AI, here are your takeaways:
First, the transformation is real. Don't be like Paul Krugman, who compared the internet to a fax machine in 1998. Don't underestimate the change coming. AI will reshape how marketing works, and it's happening right now.
Second, don't panic. This isn't the time to indulge fantasies about the end of marketing as we know it or the imminent collapse of the creative economy. AI isn't replacing marketers—it's amplifying them.
Third, lean in. The marketers who will thrive are the ones who see AI as a force multiplier, not a threat. They're the ones experimenting now, learning how to orchestrate AI tools while doubling down on the distinctly human skills that matter more than ever: strategic thinking, audience empathy, narrative craft, and the ability to mobilize people around ideas.
The future of marketing isn't waiting for permission to start. It's being built right now by people who see what others don't. The only question is whether you'll be one of them.
The bottom line? AI won't make marketers obsolete. It will make the best marketers unstoppable. And the demand for that level of insight, strategy, and human connection? It's about to explode.
