Work in Marketing? AI Just Rewrote Your Job Spec

Not so long ago, Zalando’s marketing ran on a fixed track: Most of the imagery, featured products and storytelling on its website were locked into a calendar that was often planned months in advance.

Today, Zalando.com can reflect the latest trends in near real time — especially in hype-driven categories like sneakers. Around major sporting events like marathons, shoes worn by winning athletes can quickly go viral on TikTok, and the retailer can just as quickly surface those styles prominently on its site.

“We’ve truncated that production time from eight weeks into days,” said James Rothwell, Zalando’s senior vice president of marketing and content. “That allows us to move at the speed of culture.”

Rothwell credits artificial intelligence for Zalando’s more agile approach to marketing, describing 90 percent of the content shoppers see on the retailer’s website as “AI enhanced.”

Within fashion, Zalando is often an early adopter of new technology. But its AI everywhere approach to marketing is increasingly common across the industry. Tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini — alongside a growing ecosystem of in-house and third-party applications — are reshaping how the work of pitching products to consumers gets done.

Campaign ideas that once took weeks to mock up can now be generated in a matter of days, or even hours. The job itself is increasingly centred on creative direction – deciding what to put out in the world, with an understanding that AI will be doing at least some of the actual creating.

While fears of mass layoffs have yet to be born out, AI is enabling companies to farm out marketing work to smaller teams, and in some cases rely less on outside agencies. Senior marketers are also taking on a broader mandate, running data analysis and allocating spending, tasks once handled by data scientists or finance.

“There’s this notion in hiring that every now and then you stumble across a ‘10xer employee [who] … will get you 10 times more productivity,” said Trevor Testwuide, chief executive of Measured, which helps companies like Skechers, Vuori and VF Corp. measure marketing performance. “Now, in marketing, AI is enabling a broader group of people to be 10xers.”

Who’s Doing the Work

Zalando’s marketing team uses AI-powered tools with names like Discovery Feed, Trend Spotter and Zalando Assistant. All are designed to aid search and product discovery — and are shifting the role of marketers and content teams toward creating the “fuel” that feeds these systems: “rich, inspiring storytelling that ensures these complex algorithms truly personalise the experience for every individual user,” Rothwell said.

What remains to be seen, experts say, is how much of that work can ultimately be done by fewer people as the technology improves.

“What we’re seeing, especially over the last six months, is that the role of AI isn’t to make 1000 people 10 percent more productive, it’s to enable 10 people to do the work of 1000,” Rothwell said, adding that the company has not laid off anyone on its marketing team due to their job being replaced by AI.

At some brands, that shift is reversing the content workflow — rather than building campaigns from scratch, marketers are prompting AI tools, then refining and polishing the output. Put another way: “Marketers used to be doing the homework, and now they’re grading the homework,” said Loreal Lynch, chief marketing officer of AI marketing platform Jasper.

If AI is speeding up the work, it’s also collapsing who does it. Marketing leaders are taking on tasks that once sat with agencies or specialist teams — pulling their own data, analysing performance and making spend decisions directly, often in real time.

“We’d have full teams spending hours trying to wrap our heads around the business the week before — what we did, what worked, what didn’t,” said Jennifer Shipe, marketing chief at luxury bridal boutique Kleinfeld (who was also referencing past roles at companies like Starbucks and Carter’s). “There’s a lot less time putting together decks to rationalise performance when you’ve got easy ways to spot … and even fix in real time.”

That transition is already reshaping how brands use external partners. Shipe said her four-person team is relying less on agencies for everything from SEO to copywriting, as AI tools make it easier to bring those capabilities in-house.

“We rely less on external talent to offset where we may not be experts,” she said. “We’re more self-sufficient.”

At Zalando, big brand campaigns still run through traditional agency partners, while AI tools are used to scale and personalise the output. The result is a hybrid model — human-led creative up top, with AI extending it across channels and down to the individual customer.

The retailer’s recent campaign featuring actress Lily Collins put that model into practice: Zalando used Google’s AI-video generator Veo3 to create video assets that ran alongside hero campaign work developed with agency Wieden+Kennedy.

Getting Real About ROI

When brands do bring in outside partners, the bar is higher — favouring firms with proprietary tools or deep AI expertise that can deliver a clearer read on performance, and ultimately, a better return on marketing spend, some experts say.

At Measured, Testwuide said he’s seeing increased demand from fashion brands looking to get more precise about how their media spend performs across platforms like Google, Meta, Pinterest and TikTok.

“Brands come to us frustrated they’re spending millions on paid media and don’t have a trusted read on what’s actually driving the business,” he said.

Measured’s AI essentially pulls together performance data with everything around it — from campaign inputs to share of wallet to marketing spend — to get a clearer picture of what’s actually working, Testwuide said.

Sharper tools aren’t just making marketing teams more self-sufficient — they’re sharpening the focus on ROI while reducing the need for cross-functional support from teams like engineering, data and finance, said Austin Goldman, co-founder of Shoplift AI, a platform that lets brands test and tweak e-commerce experiences in real time.

“All of the teams that would have to traditionally support marketing, whether it’s engineering, data, design, finance [play less of a role],” he said. “They, too, can focus on the things that have the highest leverage and matter for them, and marketers can self-serve.”

The Human Touch

Marketers say one of the most important roles they play is in setting the guardrails around how AI can be used in campaigns. While the technology is improving rapidly, consumers are also getting better at spotting AI imagery, especially when it’s done poorly. The backlash can be brutal, and hard to predict.

At Zalando, teams are using AI to read demand signals and inform direction — but the company says it’s committed to having humans shape the narrative, write captions and set the creative vision, Rothwell said.

At Kleinfeld, Shipe said her team acts as “editor and brand steward,” leaning into the human element for areas like store experience, styling and client services, even as those decisions are informed by AI.

“We’re brand stewards with tools that automate and create for us, but [the humans] are ensuring that our voice is still pure, still distinct,” she said.

In the end, most insiders say AI’s impact is less a wholesale reinvention of marketing than a recalibration of how the work gets done.

“I feel very strongly that the role of marketing hasn’t changed for a long time and won’t change for a long time,” Rothwell said. “We just have better tools to do that than ever before, and we can do it at a speed, scale and cost we’ve never had.”

Read “The Fashion Marketer’s Guide to AI,” a deep-dive on how brands can harness AI at every stage of the marketing funnel as the technology transforms the industry.