Marketing Manager

Marketing managers plan campaigns, set strategy and run teams. The manager job itself is growing: the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects marketing manager jobs to grow 7% from 2025 to 2035, faster than the 3% average. But BLS projects advertising and promotions managers to shrink 4%, and names AI as a reason, because managers and their staff will use it 'to more quickly generate, test, and modify digital advertisements', so fewer managers are needed to oversee advertising staff.

The bigger risk is the road into the job. BLS says marketing managers typically need experience in a related job first, such as market research analyst, sales representative or public relations specialist, and the analyst and marketing specialist jobs are among the most AI-exposed anywhere. Anthropic's March 2026 study, which tracks how much of each job's tasks people already use its Claude AI for at work, puts 'market research analysts and marketing specialists' at about 65%, the 5th highest of 756 jobs it measured. Marketing managers themselves come in at about 32%, still in the top 8%. A December 2025 McGraw Hill piece for marketing students says the tasks that once introduced new graduates to the field are increasingly automated, and that some firms have tried replacing entry-level staff with AI tools.

We keep this at High (4), and this departs from the plain BLS reading. BLS still projects the specialist and analyst group to grow 7%, with about 82,000 openings a year, which on its own would point to 3. We weigh the entry level more heavily, as our rubric says to: when AI already covers most of the work new hires do, fewer of them are likely to be needed, and the path to manager gets narrower.

What would change the score: data showing entry-level marketing hiring holding up as AI use spreads would move this to 3. A BLS projection cut for marketing specialists that names AI would confirm the 4.