An Anticipated Wave of AI Specialist Jobs Has Yet to Arrive

But it hasn’t yet led big brands to shuffle their org charts or hire for AI-specific leadership roles.

“I’ve not seen or even heard or even come remotely close to a VP of AI marketing leadership role," said Richard Sanderson, who runs executive staffing firm Spencer Stuart’s marketing, sales and communications officer practice in North America. “If we’re led to believe the impact is going to be so widespread, why are we not seeing it? What is going on?"

It’s unclear when such roles will appear, some experts said, if they appear at all.

The number of open marketing jobs whose descriptions mentioned AI in November 2023 was 8% lower than a year earlier, spanning the months when artificial-intelligence startup OpenAI first captured the public’s imagination, according to data from job board Indeed.

Indeed itself has used generative AI to save $10 million on content development this year, according to Jessica Jensen, the company’s chief marketing officer. But AI appears to have had a less pronounced effect on marketing than on other practices when measured by job descriptions. From November 2022 through November 2023, listings for sales jobs were nearly three times as likely to mention AI as marketing job listings, according to Indeed.

Titles like chief AI officer and head of AI aren’t completely new to the marketing world. Some business-to-business companies and advertising conglomerates such as WPP have, in recent years, appointed such leaders in roles that focus on promoting their own products and services to business clients.

Coca-Cola takes the lead

But big consumer brands have largely not taken similar steps.

Coca-Cola has been one exception. After releasing its first AI-generated ad campaigns earlier this year, the beverage giant in June signaled its dedication to the new technology by promoting two executives to the newly created roles of global head of generative AI and global head of marketing AI.

Coca-Cola established the roles to accelerate its teams’ adoption of generative AI tools in their day-to-day work, said Manuel “Manolo" Arroyo, Coca-Cola’s global chief marketing officer.

“In our organization that has more than 2,000 marketeers today around the world, as you can imagine, there’s probably 1,999 that have already jumped into AI, and everyone wants to do stuff with AI. So we’re trying to orchestrate all of that," Arroyo said.

A number of large brands are likely to follow Coca-Cola’s lead in the coming months, said Jamie McLaughlin, chief executive and founder of marketing and communications recruiting firm Monday Talent.

“It seems to be you have one central evangelist for AI, and they are, within reason, overseeing marketing across the company," McLaughlin said.

Such positions may be necessary for consumer-facing companies struggling to properly address the rapid evolution of these tools, said Rex Briggs, who joined marketing technology firm Claritas this month as chief artificial intelligence officer.

But will other businesses follow suit?

Others, however, believe Coca-Cola will remain an outlier, at least in the near term.

The process of determining how best to use AI in a risk-averse way remains in its early stages, which is a key reason why AI-specific jobs have yet to crop up, said Andrea Brimmer, chief marketing and public relations officer at financial-services provider Ally Financial. Many companies, for example, are still in the process of establishing guardrails to prevent AI tools from compromising users’ data or producing content that isn’t on-brand, she said.

CMOs have also opted for a deliberate approach to ensure that this shift isn’t simply about generating buzz, said Shiv Singh, former CMO at online lender LendingTree. They want to avoid the fates of other once-hot, tech-focused titles, such as chief metaverse officer, that quickly went from innovations to punchlines.

“CMOs have been burned in the last cycle by cryptocurrencies and NFTs, so they’re a little slower now to move," Singh said.

Other speed bumps include the challenge that emerging tech has historically been the domain of chief technology officers instead of CMOs, he said. And legal teams must often address issues regarding AI’s potential to co-opt others’ data or intellectual property without permission before giving marketers their approval to use these tools, he added.

From a cultural perspective, the act of choosing one person—especially if it’s an outsider—to manage such an important pivot could ultimately slow the process down by making others feel less responsible, said Elle McCarthy, who recently held executive marketing positions at payments provider PayPal and gaming company Electronic Arts.

Any senior roles responsible for integrating AI tools across a company’s marketing operations may turn out to be temporary, because the companies in question would theoretically no longer need these executives once the tools have been fully adopted, according to McCarthy.

“I worry for people who have it in their job title moving on," she said.

AI leadership jobs may not be needed at all if companies manage to successfully integrate the tools into all positions within their marketing teams, said Sanderson of Spencer Stuart.

Whether such specialist roles become their own category in marketing or not, interest among job seekers is rising.

Views of marketing jobs that mentioned AI rose 60% from December 2022 to December 2023, while applications for such posts rose 70%, according to data from professional networking platform LinkedIn.

Total views for marketing job listings that mentioned AI grew 14% faster than views for marketing jobs that didn’t, LinkedIn found.

Write to Patrick Coffee at patrick.coffee@wsj.com