What we can learn from previous marketing technology disruptions to navigate the new world of AI-enabled marketing.
Last week I stood in front of a room full of Ross School of Business students and tried to give them something to navigate entering a career in marketing while it is undergoing the biggest disruption in a generation.
I graduated from Michigan in 1994. My entire digital experience at that point was walking down to the Fishbowl, signing up for a umich.edu email account, and hitting send on a paper, terrified I'd done it wrong. I walked out of Ann Arbor into a world that was about to change faster than anyone in that room understood. And it has kept changing, every few years, in ways that felt like the ground shifting every time.
I've lived through six of those technology waves. The one we're in now is different in kind, not just degree. The short version of my career: machine learning at GE in 1997, building a customer lifetime value model using decision trees to restructure how a major credit card business thought about, and organized around, its customers. Building customer and digital analytics at a big agency in the early 2000s. The iPhone in 2007 breaking everything we'd just figured out. Social and programmatic in 2009. Co-founding a company in the cloud and SaaS era, which we sold to OneMagnify in 2019. And then 2022, when generative AI arrived and the rules changed again.
Every one of those waves felt like the most disruptive thing that had ever happened to marketing. Every single time, the people who thrived weren't the ones who knew the most about the old tools. They were the ones who could learn fast, adapt, and hold onto their judgment while everything around them changed. That's not a historical observation. It's a job description for today.
Gartner projects 40% of enterprise applications will include task-specific AI agents by end of 2026. A year ago, that number was under 5%. The leap from generative to agentic is the one that will define the next decade of careers in this industry. The great excitement of working at a digital agency during the emergence and rapid adoption of agentic AI.
Here's the uncomfortable finding that changed how we operate at OneMagnify. When we looked honestly at how our senior team was spending their time, more than 40% of senior strategist hours were going to high-effort, medium-skill production work. Writing first drafts from scratch. Pulling research manually. Building decks that mostly reorganized things we already knew.
Digital didn't make print workflows faster and while the advent of mobile eventually improved all experiences, first it broke desktop. This is the same kind of moment. You don't add it. You rebuild. We had layered a decade of new tools on top of the same fundamental workflow. The workflow was the problem. So, we stopped asking "how do we make what we do faster?" and started asking "if we were building this from scratch today, what would it look like?"
We built an AI-powered strategy system on Amazon Bedrock, using Claude as the reasoning engine, where a strategist submits an intake form, the system ingests client data, competitive landscape, prior campaign performance, and channel metrics, then fans out to specialized agents for CRM, SEO, paid media, content, and social. Each agent does its piece. The strategist reviews, refines, and approves. Nothing goes to a client without human sign-off.
While we appreciate the time savings, the real benefit is the quality improvement. The briefs are better, not because the AI is smarter than the strategist, but because the strategist is now spending their time on the decisions that actually require judgment, not on the parts that were always just assembly. This makes all of the downstream campaign, content, creative, messaging and experience optimization work more on-point, yielding even better performance.
The challenge isn't learning a tool. It's leading a transformation. Four things I believe actually separate people right now:
Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough said about writing; "To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard." He wasn't talking about grammar. He was talking about the discipline of making your thoughts rigorous enough to survive contact with language. Prompting is writing. Good prompting requires good thinking. Your ability to ask a precise question, define a crisp problem, and evaluate an answer is not a soft skill anymore. It is the job.
But the thing I came back to at the end of the talk, and the thing I still believe after nearly thirty years of watching technology cycles come and go, is that while the technology I built at GE in 1997 is obsolete, the people I built it with are leading companies. What compounds isn't the tools. It's the people, the trust, the relationships built on real work. AI will keep changing, every wave will feel like the biggest one yet. Your ability to adapt and stay curious will carry you through. But the human stuff underneath all of it? That's still yours to own.
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*Steve Farr is Chief Digital Officer at OneMagnify. He spoke at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business AI in Marketing Symposium on March 13, 2026.*