The Marketer of the Future: Unmatched Taste, AI-Enabled

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Marketing has always been a hamster wheel: a constant, never-ending race to produce enough campaigns, content, and results.

In the past, that relentless pace required marketing teams to scale, adding specialists along the way to handle the different aspects of the marketing function.

Yet now, with AI, a seismic shift is happening. As teams increasingly adopt AI within the marketing organization, the skills that marketers (and their teams) need to succeed are changing.

For example, video production workflows that once required multiple hands on deck, professional equipment, and outside agencies are being done by a single marketer with strong taste and AI tools.

Such change, driven by AI-enablement, finally frees marketers up to be creative and to think about more than beefing up their tech skills.

It also means that in the near future, the human elements of marketing, such as strategic judgment and taste, will become the primary way to set ourselves apart.

The Evolution of Marketing Teams—Also, What Is Taste?

Historically, many marketing teams worked in siloes. You'd have your content creators on one team, designers on another, SEO experts working in another area, event managers somewhere else, and so on. Each specialist focused on one small slice of the larger marketing pie, which brought value but also created collaborative challenges.

I'm seeing a shift now to leaner teams as AI tools take on much of the grunt work, which can often be automated, and so marketers have more time to focus on what will sustain their brands over time: a sense of taste.

What do I mean by taste?

I'm referring to the combination of strategic thinking and creative intuition that good leaders have. Your taste is unique to you, and it's a necessary component of future success. Now that all companies can outsource the mundane work to AI, taste is the differentiator that makes you, you.

Taste allows you to...

Take creative risks that make sense for your company. Think of how Duolingo leverages humor and cultural moments to create viral social media content, like "killing" its owl mascot, Duo, differentiating itself from the sea of generic educational content.
Understand what your audience needs to hear from you. Consider how Gong uses data-driven insights in its content marketing, positioning itself as the go-to authority on sales intelligence.
Discern which trends are worth following for your brand, and which are not. Notion avoided the hype around generic influencer marketing and instead built a cult following by leaning into deep community engagement.
Determine the best ways to build authenticity. Drift does a great job here, building authenticity through embracing a conversational, human-first approach to B2B marketing and ditching traditional lead forms in favor of real-time engagement. Its marketers use taste to create a brand voice that feels personal and approachable, making interactions feel like genuine conversations rather than corporate sales pitches.

Taste can't be outsourced or replicated with AI; therefore, it is invaluable right now. It also tends to lead to consistent decisions that grow your brand instead of diluting it with random choices. People with taste know that just because AI allows you to do something more easily doesn't mean that you should do it!

The Marketer of the Future Is a Curious Creative

The successful marketer of tomorrow will be, above all, curious.

Curiosity is something I look for in my own team. Background is sometimes less important than an open mind, and I'd rather hire a person with less concrete experience who can show me how they've tried new things than someone with tons of experience who has only ever used the same tools.

Beyond having curiosity, the marketer of the future must be able to...

Prioritize ruthlessly—just because AI can help us do more doesn't mean we should. Calendly is a great example of this prioritization in action. Rather than trying to be an all-in-one productivity tool, Calendly doubled-down on its core strength—scheduling—and uses AI selectively to improve availability predictions and scheduling efficiency without bloating the product.
Have a crystal-clear understanding of the specific brand vision and know how to bring it to life with sharp storytelling across channels. Salesforce showcases a strong brand vision through its "Customer 360" narrative, seamlessly integrating this story across events (such as Dreamforce), thought-leadership content, and product marketing.
Readily use AI to generate ideas, experiment, and execute faster. Clickup, for example, uses AI to quickly generate campaign ideas, A/B-test messaging, and refine email sequences, helping it move faster in the ultra-competitive productivity software space.
Comfortably work across different areas of the marketing function. The marketing team at Zapier seamlessly integrates content, performance marketing, product marketing, and automation to create scalable, high-impact campaigns. That approach showcases how automation can streamline workflows, making its own marketing a proof-of-concept for the Zapier product.

I've worked all of those capabilities into my current process. I'm hands-on with a lot of different AI tools, especially ones related to video. I have an engineering background, which means I might be more inclined toward new tech, but I like to find out how things work and what the value-add for Goldcast might be. As I'm testing different AI tools, I'm thinking about our company goals and looking for ways each tool might help us to tell our story.

How to Prepare Your Team for What's Next

In addition to looking for curiosity when I'm hiring for my team, I also value versatility: If applicants can demonstrate that they've worked across multiple functions, they can onboard more quickly than marketers who have only worked in one siloed area.

I love hiring ex-founders whenever we can; that demographic is incredibly well versed in thinking outside of the box and doing whatever needs to be done.

As for your current team, I recommend promoting hands-on AI use. Most people are using ChatGPT, but how well are they using it? Do people understand what makes a prompt effective? Do they know how to use video editing tools?

Check in regularly, push them to move faster where you know AI can help, and learn how people are experimenting with AI; the insights can influence other people on the team to try new things.

At Goldcast, we set a big organizational goal to embed AI into at least 10 team workflows by the end of the year. Though we know our individual contributors regularly use AI, we haven't gotten to the point where it's a central part of team workflows—and I've seen that's the case with most other companies as well. By creating this companywide goal, we're essentially mandating AI literacy for all.

Finally, continue refining your taste. If you're unsure where to start, here's a good tip: When you notice you like something, try to figure out why you like it. When you make a choice, articulate the reasoning behind it. Doing so will help you identify patterns in your judgment and help you see what makes you different from others.

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Remember: As tasks become increasingly automated, the human elements of marketing—namely, taste—become much more critical to success.

The good news is that you have a unique opportunity here to begin offloading some of the more repetitive tasks on your plate and begin zeroing in on what will become your competitive differentiator.