New Job Titles You Need to Retrain for in 2024

 

Butter my biscuit, LinkedIn currently says that 217,000 people in the UK that have ‘AI’ in their job title. There’s even a ‘generative AI/ML solution architect’. Try explaining that to your nan. 

AI is undoubtedly the next technological platform shift. Bill Gates said he thinks that ChatGPT is the biggest technological innovation since GUI (graphical user interfaces – think a display you can click on) in 1981. This means, for Bill, AI is bigger than the world wide web, bigger than smartphones and social media - it’s the biggest tech innovation in 40 years. So, it makes sense that there are all these new jobs. 

Currently most of the ad industry is basically using AI as ‘infinite interns’, as Ben Evans likes to say. We are making AI fit with what we are currently doing. But overtime, we will change the way we work to fit with the new tool. 

All those wonky AI job titles will disappear and our whole workflow will be integrated with AI. Like we’ve done with other pieces of software such as Powerpoint or Excel. Imagine AI systems that are integrated into brainstorming sessions where teams see AI-generated ideas, graphics, and concepts. The AI would contribute to meetings by analysing trends, suggesting innovative ideas, and even creating preliminary ad designs in real time based on the team's input. 

AI is not going to take everyone's jobs, but it will take everyone’s jobs who can’t use it soon. 

 

For the past few years, everyone seemed to be hiring chief diversity, equity and inclusion officers. Then it seemed like the first position the big networks cut amidst big budget cuts. My view has always been that you don't need a DE&I position if you have diversity at the core of the work you do, and reflected in the people you hire. 

This year, we started to see an increasing number of job postings for ‘AI specialists’,  ‘creatives versed in AI’ and ‘tech consultants’. What do these roles even do? Creatives that are eager to stay relevant have self-taught themselves what they needed to know about how to use ChatGPT and AI, and how to incorporate it into their day-to-day work. There is no need to hire someone to teach them to do it. 

If I would have to talk about a role, I think we should be hiring for it would be ’chief happiness officer’. It is not someone in HR, it is not someone only focused on wellness and mental health, it is someone that ensures that everyone feels happy and comfortable in their workplace, and that you are creating the best possible environment to work in. Bhutan has their own Ministry of Happiness, and hopefully the ad industry we all follow suit.

Negatively viewed AI is a disruptor of the labour market, and that’s the click-bait news swirling. However, in a creative industry like ours, we positively see it as helping improve how we work. We can lean into AI technology to minimise task-based, repetitive processes, offsetting administrative tasks that keep us from doing the important stuff – creative business problem solving. Thus, we’re given more time and a rich source of inspiration to be brilliantly creative and do what we do best: deliver work with real emotion and impact.

We are an industry fuelled by gifted, smart minds, comfortable with change, and are constantly curious to keep pushing the boundaries in pursuit of doing what’s not been done before. We know that technology adoption will be a key driver of business transformation. How we seamlessly incorporate upskilling will need to be part of a value exchange that benefits our talent in commoditising relevant skills to help them grow their careers, while also demonstrating the win-win for our business, evidenced in how we work and the quality of outputs we provide.

At DDB, we are democratising development solutions, making them accessible for all. We are also helping our talent be comfortable with the embracing of change, staying constantly curious to learn and do new things differently by providing training and on-the-job learning that is equitable and inclusive.

Despite what some sensationalist headlines say, machines and tech are not replacing creative and analytical thinking; they will remain key, human-centric, skills – good news for all of us in adland. And, whatever the industry, there’s always going to be a need for visionary, empathetic leaders, and managers. So, while new titles will be added as existing ones evolve, the very core of what we do remains, with the future providing even more exciting ways to express our creativity.

 

I don’t foresee completely new-to-the-world job titles within our agency…yet. Some companies may add a chief AI officer, or a team of prompt engineers, but we're unlikely to. That said, how we utilise emerging technology is significantly altering the way we work. In 2024, I expect a more vibrant, constructive, and ongoing dialogue between human and artificial intelligence within most departments.

Thinking about strategy roles specifically, it’s clear that AI-based tools are speeding up the process of getting to compelling insights. I expect we’ll see a new wave of tools that go beyond good old ChatGPT that are tailored specifically for the creative agency workflow. Furthermore, increased trust and adoption of synthetic research could be a game changer in terms of the way we think about understanding audiences, brainstorming, and validating ideas.

Today, it's essential for teams to experiment with AI to see what weird and wonderful outcomes we can discover. However, along the way, human taste and craft are essential to apply context, judge what’s useful, iterate and ultimately build upon AI-generated outputs to truly get to somewhere great. 

 

 

At UltraSuperNew, AI is reshaping job roles big time, but we are not changing job titles. We've put in place an AI task force manager to keep everyone in the loop, updating the team twice a month on the newest AI developments. This change means job titles are evolving to include AI skills, but a copywriter is still a copywriter and not a prompt master. The task force manager will be key in making sure everyone at UltraSuperNew is up-to-date and ready to use AI effectively in their roles.

 

 

AR has been a buzzword in marketing for some time, but many brands struggle to leverage its potential.

 

The real key to success is creating AR experiences that allow creators to express themselves and share. And we’ve seen the most success in activating creators through AR games with our in-house social game creators.

 

Duracell was one of the first brands to see significant success through social games on TikTok.We worked with the brand to create a simple, yet addictive game that got its social audience playing and creating. This led to 45 million views on just one game, and 110k pieces of UCG. Duracell has already become one of the top 1% of game creators and the potential for growth keeps on building.

 

This is definitely an area we’ll be helping our clients invest in more throughout 2024.

 

One of the things that makes AI intimidating, especially when you are applying it to the analysis of research, is that it can feel both incredibly unwieldy and abstract. It’s like trying to manage an employee who you’ve never met, and who you have no sense for their capability or skill set. This is the same reason why in 2017, Apple’s GarageBand added Drummer to its software – an AI drummer playing realistic drum grooves but with the added ability to first choose between different base Drummer personas (indicative of their styles/genres) and then to provide them direction on intensity or flair. I predict that 2024 will see a massive influx of AI-driven research, but also of a growing desire amongst practitioners to humanise AI in order to understand how it will ‘think’ and to fine tune the AI’s capabilities to ensure responses are measured. Job title to retrain for: AI whisperer.

Head of effectiveness has become a fast-growing role in agencies. But, while it’s great to see effectiveness being taken more seriously, at Effie we think effectiveness is and should be part of everyone’s job. If marketing isn’t effective, it isn’t marketing.

A study by Grant, Berg & Cable (2014) showed that more imaginative job titles increase motivation and reduced stress, so with that in mind, perhaps everyone’s role could be redefined according to their contribution to the effectiveness of the work? So planners become ‘effectiveness engines’, data analysts ‘proof seekers’, and creatives ‘masters of impact’. It might even work.

 

In times of accelerated complexity, the common idea is to look for hyper specific skills, while what we truly need is more founder mentality. Here's why.

 

The common approach is to develop skills downstream, assigning specific professional roles to address each opportunity or need—the prompt writer, the AI integration strategist, and the VR experience designer. However, this strategy tends to focus on short-term gains, addressing immediate needs within already-defined briefs.

 

Taking a broader perspective, thinking about the future, we should lean towards individuals who operate less as mere executors (providing solutions within set briefs) and more as startup creators (tackling problems head-on to find innovative solutions). This entails developing skills upstream, where genuine creativity and innovation thrive. It involves fostering a culture of problem enthusiasts—individuals unafraid to delve into business challenges and explore creative solutions while remaining curious about experimenting with new technological frontiers.

 

At DUDE, our strategy revolves around avoiding job title fragmentation and hiring people with traditional roles but with a founder mentality. This approach aims to cultivate a culture of creative mavericks who fearlessly challenge conventional processes or briefs. Rather than claiming to be masters of everything by hiring individuals with hyper-specific skills or titles, we prefer to collaborate with freelancers, companies, agencies and start-ups who are actively experimenting with new ideas and possess in-depth knowledge of them.

Being an independent agency? That just means we're building a league of truly collaborative and insanely innovative underdogs. Because true innovation happens only when shared.

 

Digital assets like Bitcoin, which were all the rage in 2021, fell out of favour over the last couple of years. Global interest rate hikes led to a massive sell-off, forcing them to plummet in value while shiny new AI technologies (like ChatGPT and Midjourney) captured our collective imagination, stealing the limelight from them. But as we look ahead, there are strong signs that crypto will once again make the headlines. 

My prediction is that 2024 will be the year that marks the real beginning of the digital asset revolution and the moment where crypto moves from super niche (the realm of techies) to somewhat mainstream (the realm of us). It'll be like 1997 was for the Internet: the year when startups like Amazon, Yahoo and eBay IPO'd, and when the general public started to 'get' its transformative potential. Whilst it'll still take several years for crypto technology to fully mature (just like the internet), we should expect 2024 to be the year where it starts to make sense. To get there, crypto and the 'big' brands in this space will need simpler narratives around what they do and why they matter, so that the early majority can get on board. Job title to retrain for: Crypto mythbuster

 

2023 threw open a lot of complicated decisions due to the commercial arrival of ‘generative AI’. For those people out there who might have hibernated last year, generative AI is a form of prompt-led interaction that creates words, code, images, and video from a ‘prompt’, or command in old-speak.

 

There’s been a lot of focus on the craft skills like art, copy and production output changing, but I think that fad will pass quickly when the industries realise the creative aspect of the output isn’t as good as the detail a human can create. There's a growing recognition of the value in roles that AI cannot easily replicate – those that require emotional intelligence, creativity, and a human touch. But I do think the question arises: is the era of emphasising coding skills over now that AI can handle increasingly more complex programming tasks? Perhaps our focus should shift towards learning how to effectively interact with AI, such as mastering prompt writing to guide these advanced systems?

 

At MSQ, we’re putting a lot of energy into upskilling our staff to confidentially be able to navigate when AI is appropriate and ethically acceptable, and when it’s not. We’re also investing in training to make sure we have the right levels of intelligence within the people, not just the machines. We’ll see more weight on: data scientists and analysts, user experience (UX) designers, content strategists with AI prompting skills, cybersecurity experts, change management specialists, prompt engineers and creative technologists who can help clients navigate the blend of options and opportunities.

Remember when everyone wanted to work at Google for ‘the slide’ or Goldman Sachs for the childcare? Now we are ‘mandating’ days that must be spent in the office and reading countless articles about how workers will ‘never return to the office’. Maybe we’ve forgotten the joy of being together in the office? Or we have over-indexed on the positives of being at home. Either way, like most things in life, it’s about balance and this might be the time to think more imaginatively at combining the positives of both and making ‘hybrid’ more appealing. So, I predict that next year we’ll see an increase in organisations coming up with new ways to remind us all of the benefits of being together in the office for mental health and productivity. Job title to retrain for: Workplace wellness witch

It’s still too early to know exactly what will happen and the exact implications. Right now, prompt writing is a ‘thing’ until the day it won’t be. Tech is moving way too fast to jump to conclusions this early in this revolution we are seeing. What makes sense is to surround ourselves with people ready to evolve and change their ways. The monolithic and old-school ‘this is how we always did it’ kind of people are likely going to be in trouble as we move forward. We are interested in the tech-literate and AI-curious. The ones who are ready to regularly morph and adapt at the speed of this fast-paced tech progression. 

McKinsey's latest research underscores the transformative potential of predictive and generative AI, forecasting that both could contribute $22.1 trillion to the global economy. In parallel, the retail AI market is poised for explosive growth, with projections indicating an annual increase exceeding 30% from 2023 to 2032, highlighting the significant opportunity for businesses to harness AI for strategic advantage.

Despite AI adoption rates being high, there's a vast blue ocean opportunity for retailers. Currently, 63% of retail organisations use AI to enhance customer interactions, but only 54% of retail marketers use AI for channel-specific personalisation. In fact, what we’re seeing at Eagle Eye is that retailers are struggling to provide the personalised customer experiences that meet consumer expectations.

This means retailers need an effective AI-driven marketing strategy to merge customer data with contextual data points (location, history, current activity, time, etc.) to deliver content (an offer, message or personalised engagement) to an individual shopper at the optimal moment to influence a purchasing decision. 

In response to these dynamic shifts, Eagle Eye and Untie Nots have realised there’s a need to have a dedicated ‘chief AI officer’, recently appointing Ecole Polytechnique alumnus Jean-Matthieu to the newly created role.

The role of the new chief AI officer will be to use AI to augment the Eagle Eye nervous system, which enables the real-time matching and delivery of offers and communications to individual customers, with a 'brain' that can create personalised offers dynamically, on the fly. Even if you have 10 million customers, no two will receive the same offer or be engaged in the same way.

 

At Fold7, technology is evolving our roles rather than fundamentally changing them. My unofficial title for example now includes ‘head of AI’. What does this involve? A day a week of my time is set aside to immerse myself in what’s happening in the world of AI. I’m currently making a short film in AI, which, once complete, I’ll run as a ‘Fold School’ for the design and creative department to showcase the immense potential and capabilities available to us.

 

AI tools are changing so quickly - new ones are constantly available, and the tools we are already using are continually being developed and updated. Further still, there is a difference between knowing how to use the tools and using them well - it takes knowledge and craft to direct prompts to get what you actually want. Without this dedicated resource, it’s difficult to keep up.

 

I am the go-to person within the agency to continually upskill and update creatives on particular tools or to understand the nuances of prompt mastery/accuracy. I oversee the quality of outputs from Midjourney with a layer of art direction and curation applied. We also have a dedicated Slack channel to regularly share AI updates with the creative and design department.

 

There is no doubt that an AI-driven economy will require human participation, it’s just that we don’t yet know what the jobs in that future will be. The industrial revolution transformed our labour economy, but that transformation is something that unfurled over time. The key for businesses is to remain alert, keep learning and build flat organisational structures where information can be shared freely, and changes can be made adeptly. 

 

AI will certainly automate the mundane, and the risk is that brands become so commoditised and lose their value, both in terms of the products and services they develop and the tonal experience of that brand itself. Brand distinction and brand desire require highly valuable, human-centric roles that involve emotional intelligence, empathy, and complex problem-solving, and AI still has a long way to go before it can do that.