Picture your marketing team’s workday one day in the future. It probably looks like less time spent drafting emails and pulling reports, and more hours spent reviewing and fine-tuning the work a handful of AI agents have already created. 

It may be easy to imagine because that shift is already underway, according to the American Marketing Association’s “2026 State of Marketing Careers Report.” The research finds that AI is being used for repetitive, rules-based marketing tasks and pushing marketing professionals at all levels toward more strategy, critical thinking, and oversight. It’s also changing the skills for which marketers are being hired and how careers are taking shape.  

For association marketing teams, many of them small and stretched, the findings offer both a road map and a warning. 

From Creating Things to Managing Systems 

Marketing is among the fields most exposed to AI, and marketers respond to and use AI technology is constantly changing.  In 2023, AI was primarily used for writing and design, which led to a flood of low-quality content, before there was a shift in 2024 toward workflow integration and reporting. Today, agentic AI is at the forefront. 

AI agents are tools that—once set to meet an association’s goals and parameters—monitor campaign performance, flag problems, and suggest adjustments, with people approving the work rather than doing it. Marketers instead focus on scoping the work, setting standards, reviewing results, and making calls that technology can’t. 

Jen O’Brien, director for research and innovation at AMA and one of the report’s authors, says that shift reaches everyone on the team. 

“With AI and with agents in particular, we’re all becoming managers, even individual contributors,” she says. “The important parts are deciding what work to do, figuring out the best way to resource that work, and ensuring quality.” 

Why Most Teams Are Still Stuck 

Practice still lags far behind capability. A 2025 McKinsey report cited by AMA found that nearly two-thirds of organizations remain in AI experimentation or pilot mode. O’Brien says that gap is expected. The report’s AI Disruption Map shows what technology can do under the right conditions, not what most teams are doing day to day. 

“AI adoption is necessarily going to lag behind theoretical capability,” she says. 

Marketers, she adds, are well-positioned to help close that gap. “They thrive on change. They tend to be early adopters,” O’Brien says. “Their roles bridge evidence and creativity, the technological and the human.” 

That reaches beyond the marketing team. IT, human resources, and legal each bring important perspectives to AI conversations, but marketers may be uniquely able to connect them and lead with the big picture in mind. 

“The teams that are getting the most value out of AI are the ones who are asking: What can I do now that I wasn’t able to do before these tools were at my disposal?” She notes that question can apply to one individual’s role or to an association’s entire business model. 

To move past experimentation, she recommends investing in agentic tools and training and incentivizing staff to use them. 

“There are probably people already on your team quietly experimenting and doing interesting things with AI,” she continues. “Find them and elevate them.” 

Keeping the Human Voice Onstage 

All this added efficiency can come with a cost. 

“Associations should be very careful about putting out content to members or their audience that is AI-generated,” O’Brien warns. “Anti-AI sentiment is strong and pervasive.” 

She points to a 2026 Gartner survey that found half of U.S. consumers would rather spend money with a company that skips generative AI in customer-facing content. She also cites LinkedIn’s new feature that lets users flag AI-generated “slop” as a sign of how strong distrust has become. 

“Trust and credibility are hard to build and easy to lose,” she says. 

Her advice is to decide what belongs backstage and what needs to stay onstage. AI can handle work members don’t expect a human to touch, such as email drafts, tagging, and reporting. Learning content, thought leadership, and stories about the association should come from real people and real experts who make sure the quality holds up. 

Ethics should also be part of an ongoing conversation. O’Brien names disclosure, accuracy, bias, and member data privacy as key concerns that should be owned by marketing and membership leaders as stewards of the association’s brand. 

What It Means for Hiring and Careers 

The report finds that organizations have openings for fewer entry-level roles and internships while demand for senior leadership positions holds steady. In other words, companies are hiring less related to execution, but they still need judgment. 

Marketers see it the same way. AMA survey results included in the report listed communication, critical thinking, creativity, adaptability, and collaboration as the top skills needed today. 

O’Brien isn’t worried about the leadership pipeline for people already working in associations. There she sees opportunity, but what does concern her is the next generation. Because AI is being tasked with the duties once assigned to interns and junior staff, employers now expect new hires to arrive with experience and demonstrated skills in AI fluency and data literacy, which can create a barrier to entry for young workers. 

Long-term, without sustained hiring, the talent pipeline could become significantly reduced – an issue that is compounded by an aging workforce approaching retirement. 

“This pipeline problem is something associations should be thinking about not just for their own staff but—perhaps even more crucially—for the profession they support.”