
So, you think you’re ready for retirement?Â
Most senior leaders struggle with the decision to step down, often holding on long after their optimal departure date. Take this quiz to find out if you’re really ready – and read...
by Michael Yaziji Published 26 March 2025 in Brain Circuits • 3 min read
AI offers nuanced insights tailored to your unique challenges and opportunities, so your role shifts from information gatherer to insight curator. Focus on contextualizing the AI’s findings within the broader strategic vision of the company. (For instance, when the AI flags a sudden surge in eco-friendly product searches, your task is to determine whether this represents a fleeting trend or a fundamental shift in consumer values that should reshape your long-term branding strategy.)
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AI can quickly generate numerous campaign ideas, each customized for different audiences and platforms, combining text, images, videos, and even interactive AR experiences. Your task is to orchestrate these diverse elements into cohesive, immersive brand narratives. You become the arbiter of brand authenticity, ensuring that the AI’s output maintains the human touch that resonates with consumers.
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As marketing technology evolves into a complex ecosystem of AI-powered tools, you will become a digital architect, designing and managing this ecosystem, and ensuring that data and insights flow seamlessly between systems to create a unified marketing strategy. You set the strategic direction for this ecosystem and continuously refine its parameters to align with business objectives so that it can respond to real-time trends and events.
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With AI increasingly used to analyze and predict consumer sentiment and behavior, the human touch becomes crucial in interpreting emotional nuances and cultural context. Your role here is that of emotional interpreter, bridging the gap between data-driven insights and human empathy. 
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As AI systems take on more complex decision-making tasks, your focus shifts towards setting high-level goals and ethical guidelines, steering AI systems toward optimal outcomes while maintaining brand integrity and customer trust. 
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With AI executing more creative tasks, you need to focus on the aspects of marketing that remain uniquely human: building relationships, navigating ethical dilemmas, and infusing campaigns with human creativity and emotion.
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The AI revolution is redefining roles across all business functions. The future marketing manager – like their counterparts in finance, operations, HR, and beyond – will be the conductor of a grand symphony of human and artificial intelligence, leveraging AI’s vast capabilities while providing uniquely human qualities. 
Michael Yaziji is an award-winning author whose work spans leadership and strategy. He is recognized as a world-leading expert on non-market strategy and NGO-corporate relations and has a particular interest in ethical questions facing business leaders. His research includes the world’s largest survey on psychological drivers, psychological safety, and organizational performance and explores how human biases and self-deception can impact decision making and how they can be mitigated. At IMD, he is the co-Director of the Stakeholder Management for Boards training program.
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