Is AI Replacing Jobs or Changing Them? What Workers and Leaders Need to Know

Welcome to Under the Brand. I’m your host, Valerie Jennings, where we uncover the latest in AI, tech, marketing, and some of the biggest trends in the world. Right now, we are focused on an era of AI and disruption. And a lot of you are experimenting with AI. And some of you might even feel like AI has completely hijacked your job or your world. I want to highlight some of my biggest concerns about AI overall. I am an advocate for AI but responsible AI. I think that um AI is the future. The future is here and we have rapid adoption but we also have rapid disruption.

Right now, our workforce is completely dismantled by the speed of AI. We do not have a trained workforce to support all of the opportunities in AI, but also the elimination of a lot of jobs that many of us have come to depend on. As a CEO of a digital marketing agency serving global clients, we pay attention to a lot of the changes in AI. I have always been an early adopter of digital technology and marketing and have embraced it wholeheartedly.

And so while I see a lot of the tremendous benefits not just with automation and efficiency, I am also deeply concerned about our middle class workforce, not just in marketing, but across all industries. I think that we have a lot of challenges ahead of us even with how we’re educating college students today. We are moving so quickly through this technology that even companies can’t keep up. Even those that are working with AI are just, you know, moving so fast without a lot of guard rails.

But what about how colleges and the education world is training our future workforce? Many years ago, I uh received a certification in AI. I already knew then that we were going to be facing a very tumultuous landscape with our workforce. A lot of people today are concerned that they are going to lose their job and a lot of them probably will not just uh in marketing but across the board.

the biggest threat being the middle class workforce because of automation. I think that with new tech there’s always great opportunities. My concern is that we’re going to see a big division of economics between the various classes. We don’t get people the education and training. Now it may not look like a traditional road map of college educated graduates. It may need to be certifications in areas in which we can provide supplemental training.

I have taken a position at my agency, Jennings Social Media, Martekch, that we train up our team if we are going to ask them to use latest AI tools and platforms across web, SEO, creative services, analytics, reporting, buyer personas, ads, like all of that causes chaos, not just within agencies, but within businesses that are trying to market their products and services.

Right now, the systems do not scale with the AI. The AI um while it can add additional assistance and amplification to your data strategy and trending reporting, it can also dismantle your existing workflows. So my concerns really right now are not that we’ve got a a great future in tech, but where does that leave our workforce, specifically the middle class workforce, and what are companies doing to lean into this plan ahead for it and train their staff?

Because again, we have college grads coming out into a workforce that is completely different than what they’ve been educated on. There are definitely soft skills um and experiences digital marketing or career professionals that have been working for the last uh 10, 15, 20, 30 years where our experience and and our value and being able to uh discern between good and bad AI uh outputs allows us to work more efficiently.

But where does that leave uh recent college graduates? And again, how are we displacing our workers? As an example, now with Lovable, you can create a landing page or a website without any code. I do like the tool as a a supplemental tool for clients that do like to use WordPress sites. It doesn’t it’s not compatible. if you want to um export and you have to then try to reconfigure the files for WordPress uh compatibility.

But again, that’s a whole another story. The bottom line is that AI is replacing developers and coders. This was one of the the most sought after highing jobs that was out there and now we’re replacing it with AI. So in some ways it’s good news for efficiency but it’s going so fast that we haven’t put a road map in place to address it.

My biggest concern is that we forfeit our our participation with AI that we let go of our value as creators and I don’t mean just marketing creators, I mean creators and and everything that we do and and the design thinking that goes into that and allow AI to decide what everything for us.

So my ask of my uh viewers isn’t that you rely or let fear take over your mindset, but that you find a way to play in this space with AI and start getting certifications um outside of your your um employer. If you’re a contractor, it’s even more critical that you do these things.

I I ask our leaders in the country to start putting in some guard rails about how AI is used and how it influences our society. There’s a lot of bias still out there with the way AI is is programmed. We know that recently it was stated that Reddit was a major contributor to AI’s learnings.

In my view as a former journalist and somebody that’s run a a business for 22 years that Reddit is not the most reliable platform and there’s a lot of misinformation on on Reddit. So I think it’s really important that we always evolve and tech is our future but also humanity and an educated trained workforce.

I want everybody to be able to participate in the AI era especially from you know a marketing professional. I don’t want to see people displaced. But what I have also advocated for internally at our agency is that you have to be an active participant in your education. Your employer or the companies that you work for are only going to be able to get you so far.

So use it responsibly. Use it ethically. Don’t upload sensitive data that’s going to compromise other people’s lives. but to also start figuring out what are some of those skill sets that don’t just allow you to keep your job but allow you to be a voice in the AI era.

Again, this is Valerie Jennings. You’ve been watching Under the Brand. Please feel free to share your comments and insights into your experiences with AI.