Gartner put out a prediction this week that got a lot of attention: by 2030, AI will allow most high performing marketing teams to "eliminate the traditional bottom rungs of the corporate ladder."

And it's not entirely a futuristic prediction. In a survey of 1,303 senior leaders, 18% said they've already eliminated roles because of automation. Another 16% have created new ones, and nearly a third have redesigned existing roles.

That's a scary headline if you're early in your career, and an important one if you're a marketing leader planning your 2027 team. So I put it to the Leaders Circle inside the MarketingHQ community: are you still hiring junior marketers, or are AI and contractors changing when you make those hires?

The answers were more interesting than the headline.

Gartner is talking about the traditional corporate ladder, the kind that mostly exists at bigger companies. Early stage marketing teams often don't have much of a ladder at all.

When you're the first marketing hire, you're the strategist, campaign manager, copywriter, analyst, and the person fixing the HubSpot workflow at 10pm, sometimes all in the same day. There's often not much of a junior layer to cut, if any at all.

So for early stage teams, the more useful question is whether AI changes when you make that first junior hire, and what you need that person to do once they're there. Based on the marketing leaders I talked to this week, it already has.

One head of marketing at a three person AI startup put it bluntly: "Claude is literally my intern and she does almost everything for me."

But she didn't say junior marketers were going away. Her first junior hire is just "well down the line. Not a 'never,' but definitely not in the top five hires." Until then, she's stretching with AI and freelancers, which a lot of lean marketing teams can probably relate to.

Then there's Nalini Robbins, who leads marketing at Smith.ai. She describes herself as a non-technical marketer. She spent two weeks learning Claude Code, then used it to clean up 1,797 internal links, rewrite titles and metadata across 163 pages, and build a weekly workflow that drafts blog posts and tracks rankings.

Organic traffic grew 20%, and she ended an SEO agency contract that had been costing $18,000 a month. That's real work AI took over. But the person directing it already knew what good looked like, and there's still a human reviewing every post before it goes live.

I use AI every day, and for some things it's brilliant. I've had it build and wire up landing pages, forms, and complex HubSpot workflows with routing logic that would have taken me days, if not weeks.

But it also gets simple things wrong and then apologizes when I call it out. Push back even a little and it'll sometimes flip its answer to agree with me, which is great for my ego and terrible for research. And when I pressure-test its writing against something else, it'll occasionally tell me the other version is better. Okay... then why didn't you write that one? 🫠

So right now, AI is a great intern: fast, tireless, and confidently wrong just often enough that you can't leave it alone.

That's where this gets more complicated than "AI means we need fewer junior people." At a big company like IBM, where I spent part of my career, a senior marketing leader doesn't want to sit there prompting a partly trusted LLM all day. They want to hand work to someone who understands the context and comes back with something they can trust and hold accountable. AI isn't consistently there yet.

Early in my career, I spent a lot of time doing things like making decks look good for executives. It wasn't glamorous work, and AI can do most of it now. But I learned more from it than I realized at the time. I saw which slides survived the meeting and which got cut. I learned what executives actually cared about, how they wanted a story told, and what made them lean in or tune out. That shaped how I've built every presentation since, and how I learned to communicate with senior leaders.

That's what worries me about removing the bottom rung. The tedious work was never the point. The learning that happened while we did it was.

You write a hundred bad subject lines before you understand why one works. You build campaigns that flop, sit through sales calls, mess up reports, and make bad assumptions until you learn which questions to ask before you start. If AI does all of that for the junior marketer, where does the next generation of marketing leaders build judgment? Nobody has a good answer to that yet.

One of the marketing leaders in our discussion shared the best advice in the whole thread. Early in her career, around 2010, social media and digital data were exploding, and a mentor told her: "Embrace the numbers, don't be scared of the math. Learn it, master it, be the one who teaches it."

Swap "the numbers" for "AI" and it holds up today. Learn how to use it better than the people around you: when to trust it, when to question it, and how to connect what it produces to an actual business outcome. The person on the team who knows how to make AI useful will be hard to replace.

Before you skip a junior hire because "we have AI now," ask a few questions:

That last one is the one I'd watch most closely. AI makes it easy to produce more content, more campaigns, more emails, more everything. It doesn't tell you whether any of it mattered.

AI is changing the bottom rung, and there's not much question about that. At early stage companies, the bigger change is in the job itself. Junior marketers will still do the work, but more and more they'll do it alongside AI, with more responsibility for questioning, evaluating, improving and being held accountable for the end product.

That gives marketing leaders a new problem to solve: how do we capture the productivity gains from AI without eliminating the work that teaches people how to become good marketers?

The leaders who figure out how to do both will build stronger teams. The ones who cut the bottom rung entirely may find out in a few years that they also cut their bench.

Keith Abramson, VP of Sales at SecurityScorecard and my old partner in crime at Cypago, made a related point on our recent episode: “People leadership is an exponent.” When all the skill sits with one person, that person becomes the choke point. It's worth thinking about as AI pushes more of us into doing it all ourselves.

Listen to the full episode →

I asked this question in the MarketingHQ community, and the discussion there became the basis for this edition. That's exactly what I want MarketingHQ to be: a place where early-stage B2B marketers bring the questions they're actually dealing with, compare notes, and learn from people doing the work.

We're still early, with about 85 in-house marketers inside right now, including a private Leaders Circle for heads of marketing, VPs, and CMOs. There's also a curated jobs list every Friday and a Boston group planning its first in-person meetup.

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