1. Senior AI-powered generalists will be in high demand

Hiring shifts towards senior AI-fluent generalists with a bias for action. A thinker and an operator.

AI-powered generalists bring experience and taste. They design smart agents with strong marketing fundamentals blended with real AI fluency. 

Senior talent beats scale. Coordination costs kill speed faster than headcount helps it. Senior operators can self-correct without process.

2. Every marketer will partner with an AI engineer

AI engineers and vibe coders will become new roles as well as skills on your CV. They'll build, maintain and iterate on agents and orchestrate them together. 

Advanced agents with high-quality output require engineering skills that marketers don't traditionally have. 

Multi-agent orchestration platforms will include prebuilt automations, but teams will still need technical expertise to customise and optimise these systems. 

Prompt engineering will become obsolete as the majority of LLMs will be able to help humans with prompting.

3. When content is free, brand is priceless

Here's the counter-intuitive truth: as cost pressures drive template usage and AI-generated content floods channels, your brand and creative platform become even more valuable, not less. 

Brand, creative originality and curation are the intangibles that differentiate. 

Producing content will be easy, while crafting stories that connect emotionally will require skills at a different level. 

Strong, coherent visuality will become critical. Brands will be more polished, more differentiated and more thoughtful.

4. Creatives will be in even higher demand

Creative Directors, Creative Strategists and Designers will bring strong judgment, curation, psychology and taste. 

These professionals build strong brands. 

They will fine-tune agents and push quality boundaries in agent output through their critical judgment, feedback, high standards and taste.

5. Taste becomes your superpower

As AI makes output cheap, drift and sameness spread faster than ever. Taste becomes the last real moat. 

The risk? "Human slop," when people approve AI work without high standards. 

Playing, exploring, and creating to nurture taste will become critical time investments. 

Human superpowers like creativity, intuition, inspiration, and curation will be what differentiates winners.

6. Performance channels get fully automated

Digital channels feel noisier: search is harder, paid social more expensive, fewer obvious new breakout channels. 

Channel management will get automated and won't be an important role anymore. 

All in-channel optimisation will be done by AI. Partially, creative will get automated soon. 

7. Community returns to Marketing Roadmaps

Brands are putting more energy into creators, community, events and in-person education. 

Word-of-mouth will be treated as the compounding loop: creators show the product, community events make the product be experienced and users share outputs.

8. Agentic AI becomes the norm

Instead of thinking "Do I need to hire an email marketing executive?", you'll be thinking "What should my email agent do?" 

An agentic system is self-executing, keeps looping until the task is done, can use tools (connect to your Google Ads and CRM) and is autonomous, not just Q&A.

Humans will still want to feel useful and have agency, harnessing the illusion of control.  “Human-in-the-loop” agents will prevail, to give us the feeling of agency.

9. Speed becomes the competitive advantage

How fast and how well you can use AI in your operations will determine winners. 

AI will drive and power operations, not just support it. 

With AI capabilities doubling every 7 months, the pace is exponential.

With speed accelerating, the question of emotional resilience and wellbeing will become a priority. How well can you manage yourself to manage AI?

10. Vibe coding becomes a CV skill

This year, we saw the proliferation of new skills: prompt engineering, building AI agents, and automations. 

2026 will be the year of vibe coding. 

Why would you describe an idea when you can build a prototype? 

Marketers will start vibe coding and prototyping new tools. It will become a key skill on your CV.

11. Everyone gets an AI Personal Assistant

Everyone will have an AI agent that works as a knowledge base, coach, companion, therapist, and amplifier. 

Use AI to fill your blind spots. Use AI to compensate for your weaknesses.

Automate all your strengths and superpowers. 

12. Your personality matters even more

How authentic are you? 

How do you make decisions? 

What is your taste? Your critical judgment? 

Are you a systems thinker? Can you connect the dots from different disciplines? 

How diverse are your hobbies? 

How curated is your life?

Critical judgment, taste, curation and knowledge of human psychology will become top skills. Tasteful guardrails and high standards will separate exceptional work from mediocrity.