The creative industry used to be a tidy neighborhood. Graphic designers designed. Copywriters wrote. Editors edited. Creative Directors strategized. Project Managers tried to keep the whole thing from sliding into chaos before the deadline.
Then AI showed up with a suitcase and no forwarding address, and suddenly, everyone is rewriting their job description on the fly.
We now have titles like “AI Content Engineer” for what was once simply a writer on the marketing team, and “Prompt Strategist,” essentially “the person who knows how to talk to chatbots without making them weird.”
But here’s the part that goes deeper than a few buzzy name changes: new roles are actually being born, not just renamed. As AI expands what creative teams can do, it also exposes gaps that still require human judgment — roles around narrative integrity, ethical decision-making, trust-building, and sense-making that didn’t exist five years ago.
This is where things get complicated. Creative directors now have to design teams for a landscape with no playbook. Job seekers are trying to prove they’re prepared for roles that no one has ever formally held before. The titles are shifting, yes, but the work is evolving faster.
Do we have all the answers right now? Definitely not. But innovative leaders like Kody Gurfein, Chief Marketing Officer at Exiger, can show the rest of us how AI is really reshaping creative work.
Before diving into these new gigs, let's zoom in on what’s changing behind the scenes and how creative priorities shift once AI becomes part of the daily workflow.
Let’s be clear: Simply renaming jobs to sound more AI-driven or cutting entry-level roles in the name of “efficiency” is risky. Not because change is bad, but because it’s superficial. Treating AI as a branding fix or a cost-cutting shortcut avoids the real work: deciding which tasks humans should fully own, which AI can enhance, and how those tasks fit together.
Entry-level roles aren’t just headcount. They're the root of judgment, context, and institutional memory. Strip them out without rebuilding the workflow, and you’re not trimming payroll. You’re hollowing out your future.
Here’s the “aha” more creative teams are waking up to. Scaling with AI doesn’t start by subtracting people. It starts by redesigning the work.
Harvard Business Review highlights why:
Gurfein has spent a decade leading global marketing teams around risk, trust, and emerging tech. Since 2022, her team has been recognized for navigating complex markets and re-architecting itself alongside generative AI (the branch of AI that doesn’t just analyze data but creates new content, ideas, and outputs).
She compares this transformation to watching her newborn grow into a toddler: “Three years sounds short, but the change is unmistakable.”
Generative AI doesn’t just make marketing teams faster; it changes how they operate. Each person now works alongside AI agents that can automate workflows, and produce drafts, concepts, and iterations at machine speed. The human role shifts from execution to taste, judgment, and direction. The roles don’t go away, but they do widen. Expectations rise. People are asked to move faster and make higher-level decisions.
“More output isn’t the goal. More impact is.
Invest in needle-moving work, not just personal productivity.”
- Kody Gurfein, Exiger CMO
And she states that this is the real challenge for CMOs right now: focusing on work that ties to the pipeline and revenue, not just volume. Modern marketing roles are becoming orchestration roles: campaign executors, editors, strategists, and data-aware “taste leaders” who know how to guide AI toward distinctive, on-brand outcomes.
And as AI-to-AI communication grows, teams aren’t just creating for people anymore, but for agents that filter and interpret on their behalf. Work must resonate with humans while being readable and rankable by AI.
Using the Marketing team as our working example, it’s clear that generative AI isn’t replacing marketers, but it is changing where their value comes from.
Ed Wood notes in Career Foundr that when rote tasks take minutes instead of hours, human value shifts to deciding what’s worth making. The job becomes orchestration, not volume.
This is why hybrid roles are emerging: Brand + AI Strategists, Prompt Editors, Content Quality Leads. These are the people whose job is to direct the system, not just operate it. Remember, titles are just labels; the real shift is in how value is created.
“The future of marketing doesn’t belong to the fastest typist, It belongs to the best orchestrator. And the teams who win won’t be the biggest, they’ll be the ones who figured out what not to do, what only a human should do, and how to build a flywheel that runs on both creativity and code."
- Ed Wood, Career Foundr
At Exiger, Gurfein describes a model where every team member effectively leads a “micro-team” consisting of one human, a network of AI agents, and a connected tech stack.
The human defines the direction, target audience, and narrative integrity. AI extends their capacity by generating campaign concepts, producing and refining drafts across multiple platforms. But most importantly, final approval sits with the team, who ensures full alignment across every output before launch.
Instead of scaling by headcount, Gurfein and her team are scaling by capability per person. Each marketer becomes a mini “command center,” supported by automation that handles content creation and repetitive work, and frees them to focus on judgment, storytelling, and relationship-building.
This then allows managers to shift from supervising people to orchestrating micro-teams and aligning human talent and machine output toward strategic goals.
When building human and AI teams, the dividing line isn’t efficiency. It's value. With this mindset, a team can decipher which tasks make sense to be automated vs. human-led.
As Gurfein puts it, “You can replicate a style. You can’t replicate taste.”
Humans become editors and conductors in deciding what to keep, what to scrap, and what defines the brand’s meaning. So while AI handles the scale, humans ensure the soul.
Creative workflows are no longer linear. Marketing teams now operate like mission control: monitoring, prompting, and refining AI systems that run in parallel.
Exiger’s internal “hyper automation” project uses tools like Zapier and custom GPTs trained on SharePoint data to build campaigns from bullet points to fully formatted outputs. The secret isn’t more technology… It’s governance.
That means teams now need a new kind of brand management: prompt libraries, style documentation, and a layer of oversight (maybe even an AI Council to ensure that speed doesn’t outpace standards or ethics).
AI makes “more” dangerously easy. But more does not equal better. Without human focus, AI floods systems with noise.
To stay focused:
“Knowing what to cut is just as important as knowing what to create,” Gurfein says.
Restraint becomes the modern team’s competitive advantage.
Now, let’s hone in on some (really, just a mere handful of the many out there!) emerging roles in creative and marketing teams shaped by AI, along with what they do and why they matter.
“Forget coding. The most valuable new skill might be knowing how to talk to machines,” writes Steven Vallis on LinkedIn.
A good AI Prompt Engineer knows how to shape:
CBS News points out that, unlike many tech jobs, a Prompt Engineer doesn’t always require a full engineering background. What matters is curiosity, creativity, and the ability to test and iterate.
AI doesn’t care about bias, fairness, or consequences — only probabilities. That’s why the AI Ethicist is emerging as one of the most critical roles of the decade. As companies scale generative and predictive systems, someone has to ensure the technology enhances human life rather than quietly undermining it.
The AI Ethicist’s job is to make sure every model, dataset, and output aligns with ethical, legal, and societal standards. They map risks, shape governance, and build guardrails across teams.
Vallis details that AI Ethicists are the ones asking:
“The best companies will make this role central, not optional… because the reputational and legal risks of unethical AI use are massive,” Vallis emphasizes.
As AI becomes a core capability, the AI Product Owner becomes essential. AI Product Owners translate business needs into AI-enabled products. They bridge data science, engineering, design, and ethics.
They're embedded in evolving workflows and aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, a sentiment shared by a first-hand AI Product Manager on Reddit: “This is a transformative technology with enormous implications for society. There is SO MUCH work to do in this space. I am not at all worried about AI replacing PMs. It will accelerate us.”
Much like an infrastructure PM understands technical systems, the AI Product Owner understands AI’s technical architecture, its limitations, and its opportunities. They bring a working fluency in how models are trained, how data flows through systems, and how AI behavior impacts user experience.
The Reddit thread explains that the role can take two forms:
Ultimately, they act as orchestrators of human + machine collaboration, ensuring AI features solve real problems rather than becoming technical gimmicks.
Let’s rewind to an important word Gurfein mentioned earlier. Taste.
Taste is knowing what’s right for the brand and what should never see daylight. It’s not a resume line. It’s visible in the work. Portfolios, campaigns, and landing pages aren’t vanity projects anymore but a record of your eye, your instincts, and your decisions.
Gurfein, and others in this new creative landscape, express the need for people who are curious, adaptable, and slightly allergic to “business as usual.” As she puts it, “It’s not about getting the most out. It’s about getting the best out.”
That’s why creative teams increasingly look for the kind of person who says, “Let me break it and see what happens.” Why? These are the playmakers on teams who are willing to test, experiment, and make the right mistakes along the way. Get to a draft, then refine. Put it out there, then make it better.
In other words: Fast is fine. Messy is fine. Soulless is not.
And honestly? That’s refreshing. Maybe the great irony of all this technology is that it’s forcing us to become a little more human. We can be a bit faster, sure, but also clearer, more intentional, and (finally) accountable for why the work exists in the first place.
As Benjamin Hiorns wrote in Creativepool, the creatives who stay relevant are the ones who adapt. And they do this not by becoming machines, but by mastering how to work with them.
Bottom line: The field isn’t shrinking. It’s expanding. Today’s “AI Workflow Designer” could be tomorrow’s Creative Director. Reinvention has always been part of the gig, but now it’s the whole game.
And no one rebuilds a modern team alone. The right people, the right judgment, the right kind of human clarity. That’s what turns AI from noise into real momentum.
If you’re ready to design what’s next, we know the people who can help you build it.