We’re in a year where career trajectories and even the viability of employment itself is a huge concern among the digital marketing community: copywriters, designers, agencies, and in-house marketers alike. Some of this is coming from the hype that generative AI can replace marketing headcount due to its ability to create copy and creatives at scale.
But I feel that the root cause is deeper than just that. We’re at a confluence of multiple factors: Gen Z’s coming-of-age, the rapid commercialization of generative AI consumer experiences, as well as the emergence of a seemingly infinitely scalable Gen AI marketing toolkit. And in my opinion, the first two factors are just as strong, if not stronger, drivers of job demand and career growth for digital marketers than the third.
Demographic shift is driving mobile-centric, AI-centric consumer journeys
AI in e-commerce isn’t new. When did you last shop online and find a YMAL (You May Also Like) section on the page when you were browsing a product? Recommendation engines, driven by machine learning, date back to the 1990s. So, before we vilify AI as the big killer of tech and e-commerce jobs in 2023-2025, let’s unpack what specifically changed in the last two years.
This year, Gen Z has come of age. The oldest members of Gen Z were born in 1997 and have at least 4-6 years of working experience by now. These are the tweens who owned smartphones and smart watches, barked orders to Alexa in their homes, and have highly personalised Netflix homepages and Spotify playlists. Their consumption patterns are shaped around the deep learning technology that already permeated e-commerce in the 2010s, which is what the tech industry thinks is driving their expectation of the shopping and browsing experience of the 2020’s.
As Gen Z starts adulting, the range of goods and services they consume is growing: software at their homes and workplaces, travel services, and banking, to name a few. Hence, I believe the obsession across all Internet-based companies to focus on AI technology at the expense of everything else is a recognition of the shift in consumer demographics, and a rush to meet the perceived expectations of a generation raised on mobile-first, multi-screen, near-constant interaction with the digital world.
And Gen Z are starting to spend. According to NACS (National Association of Convenience Stores), millennials and adult Gen Z make up about 32% of consumer spend today. A McKinsey report from August 2025 shows that across all income groups, Millennials and Gen Z show a higher willingness to splurge than Gen X and Boomers. The shift in consumer demand is leaning towards “digital natives”, a term that encompasses the Millennial + Gen Z demographic groups by its cutoff date of birth in 1980.
What is this doing to digital marketing channels?
Millennials and Gen Z are bombarded with far more digital touch points than Boomers & Gen X. Gen X and Boomers have 30 years of muscle memory with search engines: AltaVista, Yahoo Search, and finally Google. I remember using physical encyclopaedias to do research for school projects in my childhood, and for most of my 1970’s-born compatriots, Google Search is like the new encyclopaedia. Facebook came about when we were in our twenties. Back then, we were branching out our careers and geographical footprint in an increasingly globalized world. We used it – and still do – to stay in touch with family and friends from our childhoods across decades and sometimes continents.
With deep learning algorithms driving increasingly precise microtargeting ability, digital touch points in the last 10-15 years went from us searching for what we needed to algorithms determining what was most suitable for us. Meanwhile, the emergence of streaming and podcasts have driven immense variety in the ways we can access information and entertainment. All of us are bombarded with a slew of digital info, but the difference between Gen Z and Generations X & Y is that Gen Z doesn’t remember a world that wasn’t this way.
Gen Z is savvier about ads than any other generation before it too. Gen X were the children who chanted TV ad jingles by memory. While online articles from Gen Z surveys in the ad agency community can vary extensively in the specific channels which they recommend for reaching Gen Z, one common thread between their survey findings is Gen Z’s craving for authenticity. This means a content strategy that looks organic is as important, if not more so, than a killer paid media strategy.
What does this mean for marketers? We can’t say with authority what the dominant means of reaching the consumer is anymore. Different demographics lean towards wildly different channels, with DAC Group’s Jan 2025 “By The Numbers” report showing that 46% of Gen Z prefers to search on social media, vis-a-vis 64% of people of all demographics leaning on traditional search.
ChatGPT emerging as a research, ideation, and now a shopping tool makes the digital landscape even murkier. Will consumers shift to ChatGPT as the new Google? Even in January, the evidence in DAC’s “By The Numbers” was showing that 31% of Gen Z was using AI for Search vs. 20% of total Internet users, and these numbers can only have increased since then with the explosion in ChatGPT’s weekly user count over the course of this year. ChatGPT’s aggressive user growth and monetization strategies announced in the first week of Oct 2025 are the first step of showing us how Generative AI interfaces could potentially spawn a whole new online shopping experience.
And ChatGPT isn’t the be-all and end-all of Gen AI, either. Google and Perplexity are aggressively moving on feature upgrades such as Google GEO Flow 3, video overviews in NotebookLM, content partnerships, and agentic commerce tools respectively, just within the last 6 months. At this point, any attempt at a crystal ball on how to engage consumers in the next 2-3 years would be highly speculative.
What does this mean for our careers?
In the past, channel expertise used to be the bedrock of performance marketing strategy. With the biggest scale coming from Google Search & Shopping, Meta, and TV, mastery of the levers driving the largest channels was the biggest source of strategic advantage for advertisers.
With bidding moving towards increasing automation with Google Pmax / AI Max and Meta Advantage+ and the proliferation of new digital touch points that the commercialization of Gen AI tools is bringing, individual channel optimization is going from being a discipline to a tactic. Strong mastery of channel levers may still produce better ROI than relying solely on the new low-touch AI bidding tools, but the element of uncertainty from platform changes, combined with shifting consumer behaviour across multiple demographics, means that channel expertise has gone from the pinnacle to the starting point in driving overall marketing performance.
As Sangeet Paul Choudhary, 2025 Thinkers50 Strategy Award nominee, has put it in his book “Reshuffle”, the skill premium of being a top channel practitioner is eroding. Furthermore, the specific channel expertise that drives job demand and takes strategic positioning could switch rapidly depending on how the customer acquisition and monetization models of the new generative AI touch points evolve.
In Part 6, I’ll go in-depth about how AI is driving the “Shein-ization” of Paid Social. In this post, Sangeet highlights how Shein has outrun the traditional fashion industry by matching production to trends via real-time AI signals. With the ascendance of AI-driven bidding on Meta and TikTok, Paid Social optimization is closely analogous to that business model. Stay tuned!
References:
Consumer demand patterns:
- GWI on Gen Z spending habits: https://www.gwi.com/blog/gen-z-spending-habits
- NACS (National Association of Convenience Stores) on Millennial consumer spending: https://www.convenience.org/Media/Daily/2025/September/30/3-Millennials-and-Gen-Z-Contribute-32_Research
- McKinsey update on US consumer sentiment, Aug 2025: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insights/the-state-of-the-us-consumer
Digital native definitions:
- Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants by Marc Prensky – https://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf
- American Library Association – https://www.ala.org/future/trends/digitalnatives
Media Consumption Gen X vs. Gen Z:
- https://www.mediaculture.com/insights/from-analog-to-streaming-evolution-of-gen-x-media-habits
- https://www.dacgroup.com/insights/blog/paid-media/by-the-numbers-generational-media-habits-and-shifts-in-search-behavior/
History of recommendation engines:
Varying perspectives on Gen Z’s engagement with ads:
- The Loop – https://www.thebrief.ai/blog/whitepaper-what-clicks-with-gen-z/
- Campaign Middle East – https://campaignme.com/im-gen-z-here-are-the-ads-i-skip-and-the-ones-i-watch/
- Fabcom – https://www.fabcomlive.com/brainfood/marketing-advertising-agency-blog/marketing-to-the-generations-how-gen-z-millennials-gen-x-and-boomers-click-swipe-and-buy-differently
- QSR Web – https://www.qsrweb.com/articles/they-like-email-billboard-ads-surprise-its-gen-z/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
- Adswerve – https://adswerve.com/blog/the-gen-z-shift-a-new-paradigm-in-advertising