Future of Marketing Series: EQ, Creativity Rise
Future of Marketing Series: EQ, Creativity Rise
Soft Skills Become Most Valuable in an AI World
The fear of job loss caused by generative AI remains high, and with good reason. Just this month OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated that as many as 95% of all marketing consulting jobs will be eliminated in the next few years. Over the past year, we have seen that AI's reality is slower and lesser than the hype. With that in mind, as AI becomes more prevalent, marketers who embrace the tools will likely thrive in this new era rather than get eliminated. Emotional intelligence (EQ), creativity and soft skills will become the pillars the marketing workforce can rely upon.
There is much conjecture in trade media and influencer circles about which marketing jobs will be replaced by AI. Perhaps a better question is, “Which tasks will AI execute, and what skills will marketers need to manage those tasks and their larger programs successfully?”
Start with the premise that over the next decade, many of the rote tasks executed in the enterprise will be automated, augmented, or entirely replaced by AI-powered bots and agents. Doubling down on uniquely human soft skills will matter more simply because AI cannot generate truly new, unique thoughts. It analyzes past data and predicts the best output. At best, AI can guess emotions and creative permutations based on past human data.
Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that marketers who thrive in this new world of AI-enhanced business will bring EQ-based innovation and creativity to their efforts. Coupled with AI tools to provide analytics and intelligence and perform rote tasks, humans become faster, more efficient, and better at their jobs.
Resisting versus Adopting More Tools
In most cases, marketers will not face competition from AI. Rather, they should worry about their peers who use AI tools to accomplish the same tasks faster and better. Resisting AI tools is probably a shortsighted view, given that, at some point, the competition will perform better in most competitive settings. It’s better to face the fire and run with it.
A simple parallel can be drawn to the early 2000s, when traditional accountants competed against peers who used Excel and QuickBooks to turbocharge their efforts. Those accountants who didn’t adopt couldn’t keep up with their peers, who could handle more clients and generate additional revenue faster.
Similarly, the marketer – frankly, any enterprise worker- who embraces AI as a suite of power tools to perform their tasks will quickly improve their overall job performance and their company’s tasks. Coupled with the ability to develop strategy and create campaigns, such a person has a promising future. They can drop older, less productive apps and adopt new tools as they become available and relevant to their tasks.
The rise of low-code, no-code applications will make rote, routine, repetitive, and often difficult marketing tasks easier for the generalist. Intuitively knowing what is needed and willing to embrace the new as part and parcel of work, new-era workers will use advanced technology to build their own custom apps for marketing department-specific actions. This further strengthens the ability of the creative, tech-friendly marketer to succeed.
How AI Will Could Improve Everyday Marketers’ Lives
If we accept the premise that, at some point, AI-fueled apps will take away boring work, people could see improvement in their work-life balance. This should be good news for most marketers. According to the Microsoft Work Trend Index, employees are more eager for AI to lift the weight of work than they are afraid of job loss to AI. While 49% of people say they’re worried AI will replace their jobs, even more—70%—would delegate as much work as possible to AI to lessen their workloads.”
As AI becomes better and more able to take on rote tasks across the marketing department, the only thing it cannot fully simulate is creative originality. The ability to create and evaluate with emotional intelligence, explore new paths with intellectual curiosity, and other soft skills that extend beyond hard data analysis will be essential in the new marketing AI future.
AI can play a role in creative innovation as a starting point or a sounding board for thinkers iterating their way to new strategies. For example, original thinking or creativity could be simulated by an AI randomizing the production of outliers. The human in the loop reviews outcomes, can validate diamonds in the rough and then works with an AI to take them to complete execution.
It has become apparent that as we move into the AI-powered app future, creativity serves as a valuable asset in the world of data analytics. An IBM study of 1,500 executives ranked the ability to be creative as their most desirable skill—even above management skills, integrity, and vision. In citing the study, F@st Company noted, “Creativity is the literal birthplace of innovation.”
Moving forward, Microsoft’s Work Trend Index ranked the following skill sets as most important in the AI future:
● Analytical judgment
● Flexibility
● Emotional intelligence
● Creative evaluation
● Intellectual curiosity
● Bias detection
● AI delegation
Notice that the second through fifth skills revolve around soft skills and creativity. The ability to cultivate innovation and adapt will help leaders stand out in a world of AI managers. Not only will these team members achieve the mean, but they will also rise above with originality. Why?
Creating the New
In the Future of Marketing CMO article, we already discussed how analytic judgment would become more of a judgment skill. Given its less concentrated importance in the wake of machine learning, soft skills take precedence, including the ability to explore, envision and create the new. Pete Townsend noted in a recent Broken Record podcast that while he loves using AI, it always recycles or mashes up past creative concepts. It never truly innovates or develops a truly new creative concept.
AI recommendations work off of probability, whether it is machine learning or generative AI. For example, four variant pictures generated on Midjourney or another image engine are based on the algorithm calculating the most likely picture to meet human instructions. A human often needs to refine its prompts further to meet their creative vision. AI Is directed to the outcome based on past imagery and human direction.
This most likely path to success is as true of writing outcomes as lead scoring. Choose your AI; it will serve the answer most likely to be correct based on its training data.
What does the rise in soft skills mean? It does not mean the team writer suddenly becomes CMO.
Instead of traditional creativity, the new strengths are strategic EQ, creativity, curiosity, and the ability to innovate from tactics through corporate strategy. In essence, the ability to evaluate and execute a wide range of marketing programs with an EQ lens is the separation point for marketing leadership, not tactical execution.
As such, operations strength and project management matter here. Not only must the marketing leader of the near-term future understand creative innovation, they must execute on programmatic initiatives. Depending on their role, they require original vision and the ability to see tasks, projects, campaigns, and strategies through to completion.
For these reasons, we see creativity, EQ and other soft skills as a primary differentiator for any new marketing job by the end of 2030 or within seven years. Lean into those very human skills, and use them to help make automation more successful throughout the marketing department.
