New CIM research finds just 5% of marketers expect AI to create new roles while 19% expect to cut headcount. Almost half are running AI with no plan to build their team's skills, a gap that will decide who comes out ahead.
Buying the tool is the easy part. Teaching your people to think with it is the work almost nobody is doing.
New research from the Chartered Institute of Marketing lands a blunt message. Just 5% of marketers expect AI to create new roles or opportunities. Nearly four times as many, 19%, expect to cut headcount because of automation. The optimism gap is real and it is wide.
The more telling number sits underneath. Of 500 marketing decision makers surveyed, 47.2% admit they are using AI with no strategy for building their team's skills. CIM expects the marketing team of 2030 to look more like a newsroom, with AI doing the research and humans acting as editors who assess and sign off the output.
Of marketers expect AI to create new roles, while 19% expect to cut headcount. Source: CIM via Marketing Week, June 2026.
Why it matters
This is the gap that decides who wins. The tools are now as common as the mobile phone, but the skill to use them well has not caught up. Almost half of teams are running AI with no plan to get better at it. That is how you end up with expensive tools and the same flat output.
The risk for Australian marketing teams is the same one that has dogged the trade for years. Marketing drifted into a doing thing instead of a thinking thing. AI rewards the thinkers and exposes everyone else, because a tool in untrained hands just produces more mediocre work faster.
What to do about it
The businesses that pull ahead will be the ones who invested in their people, not just their software.