Open any job board right now. Search for marketing roles. You'll find the same thing everywhere: "Head of Paid Media." "SEO Specialist." "Growth Hacker." "Content Strategist."
Companies are still hiring for a world that no longer exists.
I've spent 14 years in marketing. I've been the first marketing hire at five companies. And I'll tell you something that most hiring managers don't want to hear: the specialist model is dying. Fast.
The specialism trap
Here's what happened. Marketing got complicated in the 2010s. Channels multiplied. Data got richer. So companies did what companies always do when things get complicated. They broke the problem into smaller pieces and hired a person for each one.
That made sense for a while. If you needed someone to manage a six-figure Google Ads budget, you hired a PPC specialist. If you needed technical SEO, you hired an SEO specialist. Each channel had enough depth to justify a full-time person.
But that era is over.
AI ate the middle
The tasks that justified most specialist roles can now be done by AI in seconds. Writing ad copy. Analysing keyword gaps. Building email sequences. A/B test analysis. Reporting dashboards. These aren't differentiators anymore. They're commodity skills.
When I was at Kinetic Investments, embedded across portfolio companies, I saw this pattern constantly. The companies that grew fastest weren't the ones with the biggest marketing teams. They were the ones with one or two people who could think across channels, understand the product deeply, and move fast.
Generalists. Not specialists.
What actually matters now
The marketers who will thrive in the next five years share three traits:
They understand the business, not just the channel. At TRES Finance, I wasn't thinking about "content marketing" or "demand gen" as separate functions. I was thinking about how to position a crypto data lake for CFOs and auditors who had never touched digital assets. The channel was secondary to the insight.
They can build, not just brief. The gap between "marketer" and "maker" is collapsing. If you can't spin up a landing page, edit a video, write a script, configure an automation, you're going to spend your whole career waiting for someone else to execute your ideas.
They have taste. This is the one thing AI can't replicate. Knowing what feels right. Knowing when something is too polished or not polished enough. Understanding the difference between "on brand" and "on strategy." Taste is the last moat.
The uncomfortable truth
Most marketing teams are overstaffed with people doing work that shouldn't take a human 40 hours a week anymore. That's not a criticism of those people. It's a criticism of the structures we've built around them.
The future marketing team is small. Really small. Two or three sharp generalists with AI tooling, a clear strategic mandate, and the autonomy to move fast.
I've seen this work. At TRES, we went from $500K ARR to a $130M acquisition with a marketing team you could count on one hand. Not because we were underfunded. Because we didn't need more people. We needed the right people doing the right things.
So what do you do?
If you're a specialist, don't panic. But do start expanding. Learn adjacent disciplines. Get dangerous with tools outside your lane. Stop thinking of yourself as a "paid media person" or a "content person" and start thinking of yourself as someone who grows businesses.
If you're hiring, stop writing job specs that read like they were written in 2019. Stop looking for people who've spent five years in a single channel. Start looking for people who've done a bit of everything and done it well.
The generalist era isn't coming. It's here. The question is whether you're building for it or still hiring for the last one.