AI Marketing Manager, Job Description
The new jobs that are ushering in a brave new era of marketing and/or giving marketers more reason to switch careers
Hi there! You’re reading the Bonfire newsletter from Kevan Lee & Shannon Deep. Each week, we highlight brand, marketing, and creative learnings from our experience as in-house marketers turned agency owners who think a lot about creativity, our relationship to work, and how all of that impacts our identities. We’ll also feature insights from our digital community of super smart folks (which you’re welcome to join).
Wishing you a great week!
What AI marketing jobs look like today
To be a marketer in 2025 is to be consumed by existential dread. What will my job look like in six months, nay, six weeks? How do I prove the ROI of this role that my bosses, ahem, hired me to do? What’s the best way to deal with the AI of it all?
To survive, we can form commiseration groups, leave the in-house workforce entirely to start our own thing, and do our best to advocate for the type of creative, impactful work we are capable of delivering.
But today, in this newsletter, I thought we could also take a look into the future and see what exactly our marketing roles might look like in the coming-very-soon/maybe-already-here age of AI so that we can see what lies ahead for marketing jobs and whether it’s worth sticking around for.
AI marketing jobs overview
When I was an in-house marketing leader, one of my favorite activities was team-building, figuring out what roles and resources we needed in order to achieve all of our dreams (without burning everyone out). This was two years ago now, which seems like the Stone Age, because hiring someone to design AI systems was not at all on my mind. In the two years since, I’ve seen so many new jobs pop up with AI in the title or in the responsibilities. Here are a few examples:
AI program manager, marketing @ Stripe
Content creator, AI agent @ Firecrawl
And if it’s not AI in the job title, then it’s often in the description:
Marketing ops manager @ Figma: “Experience using AI tools to enhance campaign creation, personalization, or performance”
VP Marketing @ NextRoll: “Reimagine marketing workflows with an AI-first approach, leveraging AI not just for efficiency but for fundamental transformation of processes”
Commercial marketing lead @ Brex: “Proficiency with AI tools for productivity and content creation”
Of course, there are still plenty of job listings out there that read pretty traditional and do not require you to “reimagine marketing with AI.” However, when you land in the job, you can probably expect AI to be on your to-do list: 75% of workers say that they use AI because it is either officially or unofficially expected of them at work. After looking through dozens of job descriptions, you can start to see some pretty clear themes developing:
Companies want employees to use AI in order to boost productivity and efficiency.
Companies do not know exactly how AI productivity looks, so the descriptions are vague. (In fact, some estimates say 95% of genAI programs at work are failing!)
Many companies treat AI proficiency the same as they treat proficiency with other software tools like a CMS or an Asana or a Canva.
So many companies are AI companies now, which enables this convoluted AI relationship where AI is both a software tool you should use and a strategic pillar you should be excited to learn about.
Deeper dive: AI Marketing Manager vs. AI Marketing Agent
Let’s take a closer look at a couple of the jobs on this list, starting with the AI Marketing Program Manager role at Stripe.
I first came across this role in a Slack group. The original poster described the role like this:
We are hiring a program manager that will use AI to automate manual work across marketing and increase the team's productivity. Design workflows, build prototypes, and partner with engineers to deliver solutions. The person in this role will be among the first to build the AI skills required for every marketer in the future.
Maybe a little hyperbolic there in the end, but I don’t think it’s understating the actual impact on every current and future marketer at Stripe at least. This new AI marketing manager will be figuring out how the entire marketing org can and should use AI.
Here are some highlights from the JD:
The role involves using AI to transform go-to-market (GTM) workflows, streamlining processes, and increasing speed to market across various marketing functions. The program manager will prototype AI agents, design pilots, and validate solutions based on user input before handing them off to engineering for scaling.
What you’ll do
You’ll work closely with Marketing and cross-functional teams to identify high-impact opportunities where AI and automation can meaningfully reduce manual work, streamline processes, and increase speed to market across areas like campaign reviews, content creation, email personalization, and ad optimization. You should be comfortable experimenting with LLMs and low-code/no-code tools, and skilled at translating marketing pain points into AI-enabled solutions that actually work and can scale.
Responsibilities:
Own and deliver AI-driven programs that improve marketing workflows—scoping, prototyping, and scaling solutions in partnership with Marketing, Engineering, GTM and Data teams.
Act as a subject matter expert in applying generative AI to marketing, particularly in reducing repetitive work and increasing campaign velocity.
…
Requirements:
7+ years of experience in product management or technical program management, ideally with exposure to marketing, GTM systems and AI/ML projects.
Comfortable building and deploying AI prototypes (e.g., using LLM frameworks, low-code platforms, agentic tooling).
Proven track record of using AI to solve Fin Tech/ SaaS GTM problems especially within the last 1–2 years.
…
The job at Stripe has either been filled or been pulled down, but you can still see the archived version on LinkedIn. You can see the salary range, too: $140,000 to $210,000 per year. Notably, this is a role at a massive, well-funded startup, the same startup that is willing to pay a Head of CEO Content up to $236,000 per year (and yes, I did say CEO content, not SEO). Salary numbers will vary for AI marketing manager roles at smaller companies.
Often, you’ll see big companies like Stripe at the forefront of new marketing roles because they have the enormous team size to experiment and the resilience to weather failure and attrition. At the other end of the experimentation spectrum are early-stage companies who are open to new ideas out of necessity: how can they get more done, faster and cheaper. Which brings us to the job board for Firecrawl, which just raised its Series A. Of the 14 open roles on its hiring page, three of them are not even for human beings; they are for AI agents only.
In marketing, Firecrawl is “hiring” a content creation agent.
Compensation: $5,000 monthly retainer for top-performing agents.
What your agent will do:
Monitor dev-tool trends and propose topics with high search intent.
Draft & Publish: Generate blog posts, docs updates, and social threads; push directly to Typefully.
SEO Optimization: Auto-insert keywords, meta tags, and schema markup; track performance via analytics.
Engagement Loop: Analyze traffic, retweets, and comments; iterate content strategy weekly. Continuously improve based on real performance data.
Your agent will stand out if it:
Has experience creating technical content that has achieved measurable engagement.
Can quickly adapt its writing style to match brand voice and different content formats.
Demonstrates understanding of developer communities and what content performs well there.
Shows ability to balance technical depth with approachable explanations.
Has integrated with content management systems and social media platforms.
Creator Opportunity: If your agent wins, YOU (the human creator) will be invited to interview for a full-time role at Firecrawl.
We’re still early days in the evolution of AI marketing roles (although doesn’t it feel like we’ve been in a low-grade AI panic for years now?), but you can begin to see some different forms taking shape, as outlined by the extremes of Stripe and Firecrawl.
Fully-AI-focused marketing roles. These are roles where a person’s entire job is to spend all day figuring out how to get the most out of generative AI and AI agents on behalf of their department. They are building GPTs, designing new workflows, training the team. They are basically “managing” the AI tools as a little team of AI individual contributors.
Hybrid roles / everyone else. For all the traditional marketing roles, these will persist but with the explicit or implicit mandate to “reimagine your role with AI.” What this means in practice is likely that you’ll be expected to do more strategy, less execution.
Fully-AI agents (no humans). These could be agents that your team creates, or in the case of Firecrawl, they could be agents you discover through some sort of bake-off competition. Either way, no humans required once the agent is up and running.
What does it all mean?
To be honest, I don’t know what I would do if I were starting out in marketing today.
My first startup marketing jobs were in content marketing; I was the human being writing 2,000-word blog posts and crafting content strategies. Computers can do that now. On the one hand, I know that I am highly capable of evolving my skills and finding new ways to work: I started my career in journalism, having learned newspaper layout on actual paper and with pica rulers, coming up with headline alternatives that omitted the letter W because the letter was too wide to fit; I am miles and miles beyond that work now, having evolved from blogs to social to strategy, etc.
But on the other hand, things are changing so fast with AI, it’s hard to know what skills to even learn, which skills will still be around in six months, which will have been replaced, and importantly, which parts of it I’d even care to learn about. People are already talking about an AI trough of disillusionment, the waning of genAI and the rise of agentic AI. It’s a lot to keep on top of! It’s no wonder that nearly 60% of marketers fear AI will replace their jobs sooner or later.
There are ways around this inevitability, of course. You could lean into the AI movement and evolve along with the evolving jobs landscape. Or you could leave altogether and go and start that new thing you’ve always dreamed about. (Ironically enough, even starting your own agency like we did at Bonfire does not leave you immune from AI, just more in control of your response to it. But that’s a newsletter for another day.)
If you want to lean in and to evolve into an AI-fluent marketer, here are some ideas …
Learn all about generative AI and agentic AI tools
Create a little sandbox for yourself (a $20/mo ChatGPT subscription is a great deal), and play around with prompting and GPT building
Build AI fluency: Learn tools like GenAI, automation platforms, workflow orchestration—your ability to design and implement these is gold
Follow AI creators on your favorite social networks
Sign up for some cool AI newsletters like Artificial Ignorance or Nate Jones’s newsletter
If you want to lean out and do your own thing, here are some next steps …
Spend some time thinking about your personal values and what brings you the most joy and energy
Connect with peers via a community like Campout or a friend group you can turn to for encouragement
Over to you
What has your experience been with AI at work?
Are you feeling excited to learn more about AI and your role, or are you looking to get out before it’s too late?
Want more like this? Join us in Campout.
In Campout, our digital community, we talk about stuff like this on the daily in our channels and a couple times a month in our live events. All supported by exercises and templates to help you craft a career with purpose and intention.
Here’s a taste of what’s happening:
You can see all this and more in the Campout community.
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