How Marketers Can Adapt as AI Becomes Business as Usual

There was a time when calling something a “smartphone” actually meant something.

The phone was smart. It had apps, a touchscreen, a camera, and capabilities that made the old mobile phone feel almost prehistoric. “Smartphone” was a useful distinction because it described something genuinely new.

Now, we just call it a phone.

The same thing happened with the internet. There was a time when having a website was a big deal. Then social media became the next big thing, followed by mobile, automation, analytics, and now AI. Each one arrived with its own vocabulary, conferences, consultants, strategies, and predictions about how it would change marketing forever.

Eventually, most of them stopped being “new technology” and became infrastructure.

Now,  marketing is going through another period of technological change, but the distance between new and normal seems to be getting shorter.

When keeping up becomes part of the job

Marketing has always required us to learn new things. The difference now is how frequently the tools, platforms, and even consumer behaviors underneath the job are changing.

Search is changing. Social platforms continue to introduce new formats and recommendation systems. AI is changing how people search, create, shop, and work. And the software marketers use to respond to those changes is evolving almost as quickly as the behavior itself.

McKinsey recently found that 90% of CMOs surveyed are experimenting with AI, while fewer than 10% have scaled it or captured value across marketing workflows, according to its latest research on how AI capabilities are shaping marketing.

That gap isn’t necessarily a sign that marketers aren’t moving fast enough. It may simply reflect how difficult it is to build something lasting while the technology is still changing underneath us.

There is a point where “keeping up” starts to become a job in itself.

And that’s a strange position for a marketer to be in. You can be very good at marketing and still feel like you’re constantly catching up on the environment in which marketing happens.

What happens to experience?

This gets particularly interesting when we talk about people who have been in the industry for decades.

Someone who has spent 20 years learning about customers, positioning, creative strategy, business, media, and consumer behavior doesn’t suddenly become less valuable because they don’t immediately understand the latest AI tool.

But their experience doesn’t make them immune to change either.

In fact, experience can create a slightly awkward advantage. You’ve seen enough “next big things” come and go to know that not every new platform deserves your attention. You remember when things that were supposedly going to transform marketing quietly became irrelevant.

Younger marketers can have the opposite problem. They may be much more comfortable navigating new platforms and tools, but familiarity with technology doesn’t necessarily come with the judgment to know which changes are actually important.

One has more context. The other may have more fluency with the current environment. Good marketing teams need both.

The goal shouldn’t be to make experience irrelevant in favor of technological fluency. It should be to make sure experience continues to evolve alongside the technology.

It was a super exciting new thing…

There’s a pattern to almost every new piece of technology.

At first, it gets a lot of attention. Everyone wants to understand it, test it, write about it, and figure out what it means for their industry. Then the novelty wears off, adoption spreads, and eventually nobody needs to explain it anymore.

It was a super exciting new thing. Now it’s just the internet.

AI is already moving through that cycle. It’s changing search, advertising, commerce, content creation, and the software marketers use every day. Retailers are already adapting as consumers increasingly use AI tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini to discover products, according to a recent Reuters report on the rise of AI-driven shopping traffic.

But eventually, “AI marketing” probably won’t be a particularly interesting phrase. AI will simply be one of the technologies sitting underneath the work.

Then the questions become much more practical: Is this useful? Does it improve the work? Does it help the customer? Does it make the business better?

Technology becoming ordinary might actually make it easier to think clearly about what it’s for.

The part that gets harder with age

There will always be another tool, platform, feature, model, or trend demanding attention.

Learning a new platform early in your career can feel exciting. Doing it after 20 or 30 years in the industry can feel different, especially when every new technology seems to come with the expectation that you should master it immediately.

A recent Creative Boom article about a possible retirement crisis in the creative industry explores concerns from senior creatives about the future of their careers. AI is only part of that discussion, but it raises an important question about what happens when the pressure to continually reinvent yourself becomes part of the job.

We should be careful not to turn this into an “older marketers versus younger marketers” debate. People of every age can resist change, and people of every age can be curious about it. The bigger issue is whether the industry is getting better at valuing accumulated knowledge while still making room for new skills.

Because there’s a difference between learning something new and being told that everything you learned before is obsolete. The latter is simply bad management of talent.

You don’t need to try everything

So, how do marketers keep up?

If there will always be another tool, platform, feature, model, or trend demanding attention. Trying to become an expert in all of them is less a strategy than a reliable way to become exhausted.

A better approach is to stay curious enough to notice what’s changing, skeptical enough to question whether it matters, and flexible enough to change your mind when the evidence says you should.

That might mean testing a new tool. It might mean understanding a new platform without ever using it professionally. It might mean asking a younger colleague how they’re using something you’ve never touched, or asking a more experienced colleague whether they’ve seen this particular “revolution” before.

And sometimes, it means deciding that the new thing isn’t relevant to you yet.

That’s not falling behind.

The best marketers won’t necessarily be the ones who know every new technology first. They’ll be the ones who can recognize which technologies are becoming part of the job, which ones are passing trends, and what all of them mean for the people they’re actually trying to reach.

Social platforms are a good example of this constant evolution. We recently covered some of the biggest changes in an episode of The Daily Carnage Show, looking at the major social platform updates marketers should have on their radar.

Because eventually, today’s big technology becomes tomorrow’s normal.