The AI performance war is pushing the limits every day. On March 9th Matthew Berman released a post suggesting that $8K/month content strategist can be replaced by a $30 AI agent solution.
Math is simple: superior content can be created by AI alone (almost) through single or few prompts. It is superior by all stats - how many people stop to view it, how long they view it. Anything. It is just superior.
And it costs only $30 to build that video.
Bad news for content creators' jobs?
Why would a company pay $8K/month for a marketing professional whose job supposedly isn’t even as good as the $30 software output?
Well, let’s give this thought a moment, shall we? There’s a trick that we’ve gone through too many times.
Lessons from digital performance hit in 1990s
In the 1990s printers became broadly available. Templated flyers and posters could be made in minutes. Before 1990 you needed several professionals, from designers to print shops to do so. It took dozens of hours.
The price of marketing materials production dropped. For small batches, it was a fraction of the cost—sometimes up to 100 times cheaper than before.
Companies started using the same templates just to quickly realize that they are not alone. Competitors are using them as well. So your poster or flyer was no different than the competitor’s.
So designers were needed again. Brand manager was required again. Because the content marketing manager's brain made a difference.
Massive amount of easily built content worth $0
We are seeing the exact same pattern today. Research from TrackMaven previously revealed that when brands increased their content output by 35%, engagement actually dropped by 17%. The same will happen to videos and articles created with AI tools. They look interesting to the public at the beginning. But once audiences see lots of them, they don’t find them amusing anymore. If the social media stream is flooded with automated content, each piece gets less attention. Less attention means less value.
So, each new AI video produced will inherently have less value. In a landscape that is already shifting toward a zero-click internet, standing out with generic content is impossible. (Read more: Doomsday for SEO with the arrival of zero-click internet)
Worthless content? A dream task for…
Well, new AI agents, of course, we could say? Prompt: “Produce new content that is different from all other content.”
Sure. But well, again, we all have access to these exact same agents. So we all prompt them to create "new, different" content?
I can just see a construction company owner typing "Create a video how we build the skyscraper in 24 hours".
That’s where it becomes painful if you are a random IT guy, a financial analyst, or a construction company owner. Are you thinking of what to tell that AI tool to do the job properly? And will you accept its result or not?
Here is the trick. It is the exact same as it was in the 1990s. This is a job for people who believe in the power of content and feel what is about to be important next. People with empathy that goes beyond the current trends in social media to build real market relationships. (Read more: Will humans transfer the future of market relationships to AI?)
It is a job for the content strategist.
If you want your brand to survive the flood of automated noise, your content marketing must remain human-based in the AI era.
The future of jobs with AI agents?
More competition. More expectations. More content. More tasks. More projects.
And less time to do it.
Because everyone will be busy prompting and comparing. Thinking. Including the most powerful ingredient of any content: human intelligence.