AI won’t replace your marketing team, but it will change it.

AI is everywhere.

Every boardroom conversation. Every LinkedIn feed. Every team chat.

And the promise sounds irresistible: cut costs, speed things up, automate the boring stuff. Do more with less. (FD's are all over that last one!)

No surprise then that according to Epsilon 94% of organisations already use AI to prepare or execute marketing tasks.

But right now, the frenzy is about rapid adoption of AI, throwing AI tools at the wall to see what sticks. And while businesses race to plug more and more AI tools into their existing marketing workflows, they are letting actual human marketers go or pausing or stopping hiring.

And that creates gaps — the kind that no shiny new tool can paper over.

AI has taken your job (for now)

Business leaders see the hype around AI and think: “Great, we can shrink the team and still hit the numbers.”

Copywriting? Automated.

Reporting? Automated.

Ad campaigns? Automated.

We're seeing this first hand in our business when a client decided not to keep one of our content marketers in favour of an AI tool... (I may or may not be stalking their blog content waiting for the call back, but that's another story!)

From a business perspective it's not surprising, in the Marketing AI Institutes 2025 State of Marketing AI Report, 82% of marketers said their primary goal for AI is reducing time on repetitive tasks while in Coschedule's State of AI in Marketing 2025 report 43% report significant cost savings through automation.

I'm not sure you can class high quality copywriting as a repetitive task, but on paper this all sounds good, right?

Except when you translate the handover to AI tools into headcount decisions, suddenly your “marketing function” looks more like a one-person-and-a-dash-of-ChatGPT function.

More tools ≠ less work

Here’s the paradox of AI.

It doesn’t remove work. It changes the work.

Instead of writing copy, you’re now editing copy.

Instead of building a report, you’re validating the numbers it spits out.

Instead of crafting strategy, you’re trying to wrangle ten different AI dashboards into something that actually points in the same direction.

And we all know that the outputs from AI tools can require some pretty severe auditing so you don't look like a plonka!

If your marketing team was already stretched or has even been reduced, then AI has actually given them a whole load if different jobs to do and your capacity problem is worse.

McKinsey found 78% of organisations now use AI in at least one business function, but “few report enterprise-level profit impact”.

As is often the case in Marketing, it's magpie season once again. This is being driven by the hype whipped up about AI and also the fear from business leaders of being left behind by not using AI. As with all new shiny object feeding frenzies the winners will be the businesses that step back, deploy some actual brain activity to identify and assess business challenges that can be made easier or even solved by AI.

Adoption ≠ impact.

The gaps in marketing teams are getting bigger

This is what we’re seeing play out with clients at the moment:

• Strategic gaps: AI can’t set direction. It has no clue about your business goals. It just churns out responses to inputs.

• Specialist gaps: Tools don’t replace deep expertise. SEO, brand, ABM — these aren’t drag-and-drop jobs.

• Capacity gaps: Someone still needs to sense-check, refine, and steer the tools. That “someone” is usually the same overworked marketer who has already had everything else piled onto them.

  
  

The impact of AI is undeniable but there's another problem. While three out of four employees now use AI in their daily jobs, only 33% have had formal training (Lifewire).

And while 34.1% of marketers report significant improvements in their outcomes with AI, 17.5% have experienced setbacks, which further highlights the importance of strategic implementation. (Influencer Marketing Hub).

So what do you do?

AI isn’t the enemy, but like every other shiny objects that has come before it, AI isn't a silver bullet to every marketing challenge. No matter what your FD or CEO says.

If you can align AI tools with the specific marketing challenges you have, understand how that will drive a meaningful uplift in business results and have the right people to operate those AI tools, you’re suddenly a million miles ahead of the curve. It means your business doesn't just have a super car parked on the drive, you've got Max Verstappen to drive it too.

That’s what IMG does. We bring the expert humans who can help operate your AI tools as well as bring their years of deep experience to understand if what your AI tools are doing or producing is garbage or not. Flexible, specialist marketers you can slot in, fill the gaps, and make your shiny new tools actually deliver business benefit.

And if your FD is still moaning about headcount then obviously our team aren't on payroll and you can cut us with a months notice...

AI isn’t your marketing team. It’s just the latest/another tool in the marketing box.

AI won’t replace your marketing team — but it will expose gaps in your team and capacity is going to remain a challenge.

The question is: what are you going to do about that?

To better understand where the gaps might lie in your marketing team, have a go at our free online Marketing Function Resilience Scorecard and discover how resilient your marketing team are today.