Part four of a four-part series on AI and Australian marketing hiring.

Everyone is worried about the graduates. Nobody has read the syllabus.

The most AI-native people you will ever hire are graduating this year. From courses where AI mostly appears as a rule about cheating.

In part one we measured the gap between what Australian marketers say about AI and what their job ads ask for. In part two we found the companies whose roles are genuinely built around it. In part three, across more than 22,000 Australian marketing job ads, we found AI capability being hired in at the top of the ladder and almost never at the bottom.

Which leaves the obvious question. If employers want AI-fluent marketers and aren’t writing entry-level roles for them, what is the pipeline producing?

So we read it. Every marketing subject running at an Australian university in 2026 — course description, learning outcomes, assessment tasks, and the AI policy where one is published. 1,188 subjects. 38 universities.

Six of them ask a student to produce something that proves they directed an AI and can show their working.

Six.

The six that make you prove it

Here are six examples we found — subjects where the published assessment requires the student to hand over evidence of how they worked with the machine.

Every one of those is a portfolio piece, and that matters more than the grade attached to it. A grade proves nothing an employer can interrogate. A decision record showing where a graduate overruled the machine is precisely what the transformative job ads in part two were written to find.

The clearest statement of the idea in the entire dataset comes from a university, not from us.

“The skill being assessed is not whether you used AI but whether you directed it well: where you took its output, where you corrected it, and where your judgement went.”

— University of Queensland, ADVT7512 Media Planning and Buying

The same task asks students to explain “not just what you decided but why, what you rejected, and where you overruled or corrected the AI.”

Read that as a hiring manager and it stops sounding like a syllabus. It sounds like an interview.

The courses with AI in the title are not the courses that make you prove it

Sixteen marketing subjects in Australia have AI in the name. AI for Market Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence for Modern Marketing. AI for Marketing Insights. AI Ad Lab. Marketing Analytics and AI.

Not one of them asks a student to hand over evidence of how they directed an AI.

The ones that do are called Media Planning and Buying, Transformational Marketing, Marketing Management, Consumer Centric Innovation, and Integrated Marketing Communications. Ordinary names. The AI is in the assessment, not on the label.

The cheap read is that the AI-titled courses are marketing rather than teaching, and our own data kills that. Nearly all of them genuinely teach AI and certify it in their learning outcomes. They are real courses, built by people who meant it.

Naming a course after AI and making a student prove they can direct one are two completely different things (it seems). The sector is doing a great deal more of the first.

We have watched this exact film before

Renaming ahead of rewriting is not an AI phenomenon. It’s how the education sector has answered every technology shift so far, and we have watched it happen at close range.

Eight years ago we were consulting to the higher education sector, reviewing the digital component of Australian marketing qualifications, and we ran our own analysis of what employers were actually asking for. The finding was stark: in 2018, 75 per cent of Australian marketing job advertisements contained the word “digital”. The qualifications did not.

What happened next is what always happens next. If employers are asking for it, the recommendation went, it may be valuable to have the term “digital” reflected in the name of the qualification.

Rename the course.

Eight years on, the pattern is the same one this research has just measured. “Digital” was appearing in qualification names faster than it was reaching the curriculum, and AI is now producing much the same response. Universities can be slow to change and remarkably quick to react at the same time.

AI arrived as a rule before it arrived as a skill

The shape of that is the finding. A rule about AI is now routine, teaching it is not, and asking a student to prove it is vanishingly rare. (These figures replace the ones we published in March. Detail in the methodology note.)

That top rung deserves a name. Call it the permission layer — the per-subject rules setting out when a student may use AI, for which task, and how they must declare it. One university tags all 78 of its assessment tasks with an AI tier. Another runs a three-level framework across every subject in the business school. Serious institutional work. And 284 of those 343 subjects have no AI at all in what they teach or assess.

There’s a straightforward reason for that, and it’s why this isn’t a story about universities being slow. In June 2024 the regulator sent every registered provider in the country a request for information, asking each one for a plan “to address the risk gen AI poses to award integrity”. Every provider responded. Read what was asked for: risk, and award integrity. Nobody was asked to teach anyone anything.

Universities built the permission system first because the permission system is what they were required to build.

The other half of it is pace. An assessment policy takes a meeting; a learning outcome takes an accreditation cycle. The course-review record from our 2018 review puts that cycle at seven years, blaming the qualification’s declining popularity partly on a “lack of innovative content since last course review 7 years ago”. That is a university documenting its own speed limit.

And nobody writes a task-by-task rule about AI unless students are already using AI in those tasks. A survey of 8,458 students across four Australian universities found 83.2 per cent using generative AI. The permission layer isn’t hypothetical policy. It’s a response to what is already happening in the room.

Universities have engaged with AI in the classroom. It just hasn’t reached the record.

It’s not just us seeing this

If AI were so embedded in marketing degrees that it didn’t need writing down, the paid market wouldn’t exist. It does, and it’s priced.

Our scan of 91 Australian non-university marketing offerings found at least 21 paid AI-marketing products on sale, from $99 to $5,800. Prices are moving up, not down. And there’s now a nationally accredited qualification for it — the Diploma of Social Media Marketing with Artificial Intelligence, accredited in March 2026, with eleven registered training organisations on scope since.

That answers the main defence of the university position — that AI is now so embedded in the teaching it doesn’t need listing separately. The rapid growth of targeted short courses, and the prices people are willing to pay for them, points to a clear market demand that degree programs are not meeting. Capability that is genuinely embedded everywhere does not command $5,800.

What the paid market sells that a degree mostly doesn’t is proof. A five-minute video plus documentation. A complete AI-enabled campaign. A working AI agent and the business case behind it.

The sharpest example is a two-week TAFE Queensland workshop that costs $195 and sends a student away with portfolio evidence that 1,182 of the 1,188 university subjects don’t ask for. It carries a Statement of Participation, worth nothing formally.

Capability and credential have come apart.

Small irony in that. On that same 2018 committee, micro-credentials were dismissed out of hand — one faction argued that collecting them would be “like collecting Pokémon”. They were half right. Micro-credentials didn’t replace the degree. They just quietly became the place you go to get the evidence.

Meanwhile the vocational sector keeps building. An $11 million Commonwealth and NSW investment has turned a Sydney TAFE campus into a national digital centre of excellence — Microsoft co-designed microcredentials, 50,000 Australians a year, and an introduction to agentic AI as its first course out the door. Its verticals are cyber, cloud, data, software development and construction.

Marketing isn’t one of them.

Where it is being done properly

The story here is concentration, not absence — and the concentration is genuinely good.

UNSW has built four marketing courses entirely around AI, all four certifying it in their learning outcomes. The University of New England runs the deepest single unit we found anywhere, declaring that “the extensive use of generative AI is a key feature”. Central Queensland has the highest rate of any university measured. UQ assesses AI harder than anyone in the country. Wollongong, UWA, La Trobe, Edith Cowan, RMIT and Monash all carry dedicated AI marketing subjects.

And the pipeline is filling. Swinburne’s AI Ad Lab is the most AI-dense marketing unit in the country, running from prompt engineering to agentic AI to disclosure obligations. It first teaches in Semester 1, 2027, and Charles Sturt, Deakin and QUT all have AI marketing arriving the same year.

Bond does it without ever naming a course after AI. It has no AI-titled marketing subject at all — its AI sits inside conventionally named ones, and two of the six subjects in the country that make a student prove it are Bond’s. On the hardest measure in this study, Bond is one of only four universities in the country.

Dr Vishal Mehrotra, Program Director – Business & Management at Bond Business School, describes the choice behind that:

“At Bond Business School, we made a deliberate decision to treat AI literacy as a core marketing competency — not as an elective or isolated module, but as something woven through how students research, plan, create, execute, and evaluate.

That means using real tools in messy real marketing contexts, not simply discussing AI at a conceptual distance… The gap this research identifies is real. Bond’s role is to ensure our graduates are not on the wrong side of it.”

Weaving AI through an existing subject and assessing the process is more work than naming a new elective after it, and it shows up in fewer of our columns precisely because it’s woven.

What the data doesn’t say

We are not saying any university fails to teach AI. We can’t see inside a classroom, and neither can anyone else reading from outside. What we can establish is what a prospective student — or an employer reading a transcript — is able to find out. Where a subject shows nothing, the honest description is no published evidence of AI capability, not an absence of AI.

The gap between those two statements is where this whole piece lives. Take one course in the census called Digital Marketing and AI. None of the four learning outcomes it certifies mentions AI, and neither does the description prospective students read. Does it teach AI? Almost certainly — somebody renamed it for a reason. Can we prove it? No. Neither can the student.

Publication depth varies enormously, so several zeros in our data are unmeasurable rather than measured. One university publishes only a syllabus paragraph. One publishes no topic list for any of its forty marketing courses. National rates are therefore computed only over the universities that publish the section being counted.

Even excellence can be invisible. One handbook renders an AI course title with a lower-case L in place of the capital I — search its own system for “AI” and the course doesn’t exist.

If you have to work that hard to find it, that tells you something on its own. And if a university reads this and says it’s nonsense — fair enough. Then why can’t we find it?

The regulator, the best courses and the best employers all want the same thing

Three parties, no contact between them, same answer.

The regulator’s current position, published in June 2026, argues for students who exercise judgement, monitor their own work and manage cognitive offloading — who plan, evaluate and adjust rather than hand the thinking over.

The best course in our census assesses “not whether you used AI but whether you directed it well”.

And the transformative job ads in part two ask for exactly that: someone who directs and corrects the machine, rather than operates it.

Banning AI is like telling students they’re not allowed to use a calculator. The answer is the one the exam hall worked out decades ago: bring the calculator in, we expect you to use it, just show us your working.

Six subjects out of 1,188 ask for the working.

What to actually do about it

If you’re hiring, stop reading the degree and start asking for the artefact. The graduate who can hand you a decision record — here’s what the AI proposed, here’s where I overruled it, here’s why — is demonstrating exactly what the best job ads in this series were written to find. Most graduates won’t have one. The ones who do have just told you everything.

If you’re studying, or choosing a course, read the learning outcomes rather than the course name. Look for a verb that makes something — develop, design, implement — not consider, explore, understand. Ask what you’ll walk out with that you can show someone. If you can’t tell from the published record, that’s a fair question for the convenor before you enrol.

If you’re a marketer already, the formal system isn’t going to fill this in for you yet. ADMA’s most recent numbers have 77 per cent of Australian marketers using AI weekly and 13 per cent with any formal training. Most of a profession, self-taught on the tool it uses every week.

And if you sit on a course advisory board, read what the market is asking for, then check what your qualification certifies. It’s a two-hour job. Somebody did it in 2018 with the word “digital”, and the answer that came back was to rename the course.

What’s next

That’s the series. Part one measured the say/do gap. Part two showed what good looks like when a company means it. Part three showed who’s being left out of it. This one went to where the pipeline starts.

The tidy conclusion would be that universities are behind the market. They aren’t, particularly. Of the more than 22,000 job ads in this series, the roles we scored in detail put roughly two per cent at the top capability level. Universities certify AI in roughly three per cent of marketing subjects. Different instruments, so not a league table — but nobody is lapping anybody.

If you’ve hired a marketing graduate this year, or you’re teaching one, we’d like to know what the published record looked like from your side. Did the syllabus say anything? Did the graduate? Share your 2c.

For the interactive dataset: jobs.my2cents.com.au

A note on methodology

Between 7 and 10 August 2026 we read the published record for every marketing subject running at an Australian university in 2026: 1,188 subjects across 38 universities, with 242 verbatim evidence quotes captured. For each subject we scored four sections independently — course description and taught content, learning outcomes, assessment tasks, and AI permission or integrity text — rather than scoring the page as a whole. Beyond the funnel above, 103 subjects (8.7 per cent) carry an AI signal somewhere in the record, and 33 (2.8 per cent) put AI in an assessment task.

National rates are computed only over universities that publish the section being counted. Where a university publishes no learning outcomes or no assessment descriptions, its subjects are excluded from those rates rather than counted as zeros. Across the 24 universities that publish both teaching and assessment, 11.4 per cent of marketing subjects carry AI in one or the other.

The non-university comparison covers 91 Australian marketing offerings scanned on 10 August 2026, 45 scored in detail. Denominators are not like-for-like and those figures are directional only. No Australian provider publishes enrolment volumes, so we make no claim about how many people are buying these courses — only about what is on sale, and at what price.

Job-ad figures come from the more than 22,000 Australian marketing job ads analysed across this series, drawn from leading Australian job boards and scored against our four-level capability assessment. Student usage figures come from Chung, Henderson et al., The use and usefulness of GenAI in higher education: Student experience and perspectives, Computers and Education Open, published online June 2026 — a survey of students at four Australian universities, not a national sample.

For the full methodology and data: jobs.my2cents.com.au

—

The full series

Part one — The Say/Do Gap in AI Marketing Hiring · May 2026
Ninety-one per cent of Australian marketing businesses say they use AI. Just 3.5 per cent of job ads asked for it.

Part two — Everyone’s talking about AI. Only 21 of 979 marketing roles are actually built around it. · June 2026
What the companies that mean it actually write into the job description — and the four questions that tell you whether you should.

Part three — AI is climbing the marketing career ladder from the top down · July 2026
AI capability is being hired in at the top. Of the 21 roles genuinely built around it, not one was entry-level.

Part four — AI has entered the university marketing syllabus mostly as something to police, not something to practise · you are here
1,188 marketing subjects across 38 Australian universities. Six ask a student to prove they can direct an AI.

Part three of a four-part series on AI and Australian marketing hiring.

Everyone has a take. Almost nobody has data.

Everyone has an opinion about what AI is doing to junior jobs. The discourse says the robots are coming for the grads. The counter-take says the grads are AI-native, so they’ll be fine.

Both camps are loud. Neither is reading job ads.

So we did. Again.

In part one of this series, we measured the gap between what Australian marketers say about AI and what their job ads actually ask for. In part two, we looked at the exceptions — the small group of companies whose roles are genuinely built around AI, and what the top grade looks like up close.

This time, the question is different: who actually gets to do the AI work?

We’ve now analysed more than 22,000 Australian marketing job ads. In May, 979 of them explicitly mentioned AI. Just 21 were genuinely built around it — roles where AI isn’t decoration, but the actual shape of the job.

And of those 21 roles, exactly zero were junior.

Not a handful. Not fewer-than-we’d-hoped. Zero. March had one. April had two. The needle isn’t moving.

AI is being hired in at the top

Quick refresher on how we read the market. Every ad that explicitly mentions AI gets scored against our four-level capability assessment: Performative (AI is named but the job doesn’t use it), Capable (nice-to-have), Adoptive (embedded in the day-to-day), Transformative (the role exists because of AI). Score each ad one to four, average by group, and you get a picture of how deeply AI is built into the work.

Here’s the May picture, cut by seniority:

Capability climbs with seniority. And it collapses at the bottom rung — junior ads sit closest to Performative, where AI is a word in the ad rather than a feature of the job.

The trend is the sharper story. Across March, April and May, executive-level AI capability rose from 1.48 to 1.76 to 1.88. Junior stayed flat, and lowest, the whole quarter.

There’s a simpler way to see the same skew. Forget capability scoring for a second and just ask: how often does AI show up at all? In May, 21.1 per cent of executive and director-level marketing ads mentioned AI. For junior roles: 9.2 per cent. An exec ad is more than twice as likely to mention AI as a junior one. (Worth being clear: this is the broad any-mention rate, so it runs well above the 4.4 per cent of ads that explicitly mention AI — our stricter headline measure.)

One more check, because single numbers can mislead. Look at who the AI-mentioning ads actually belong to, and the same skew appears: juniors hold a smaller share of them than they hold of the marketing job market overall, while executive and senior roles take an outsized slice.

Whichever way you cut it, the pattern holds.

It’s not just us seeing this

Our data is one lens — marketing ads, Australian, scored ad by ad. But the senior skew shows up everywhere you look.

SEEK’s own data crowned AI Engineer Australia’s most in-demand job, with ad volume up 295.6 per cent and average advertised pay around $162,000. That’s AI demand entering the market at the top and at specialist level — not at the graduate desk.

Lightcast’s global “Beyond the Buzz“ analysis found AI skills clustering in technical, data and managerial roles, diffusing only slowly to entry level.

PwC’s AI Jobs Barometer tells the same story with pay: roles demanding AI skills command a wage premium and sit at the higher-skilled end of the market. Peter Wheeler, PwC Australia’s Managing Director of Workforce and Change, put it in a sentence we haven’t been able to improve on: “AI is not devaluing expertise; it is concentrating value around trusted expertise.”

“AI is not devaluing expertise; it is concentrating value around trusted expertise.”

— Peter Wheeler, PwC Australia

Sit with that one. The value isn’t spreading down the ladder. It’s pooling at the top of it.

The one early counter-signal comes from the United States (flag: US data, not ours). NACE’s Job Outlook 2026 found AI-skill requirements climbing fastest at the entry level — off a low base of 10.5 per cent of entry-level postings, but nearly tripling since late 2025. Overseas, the AI-junior role is starting to get written. Here, we’re still waiting.

The people running marketing are hiring for AI faster than they’re embedding it in their own roles.

When we break the AI-mentioning roles down by marketing function, the deepest AI capability isn’t at the strategy and leadership layer. It’s in demand generation and performance — the measurable end of marketing — which averages 2.07 on our capability assessment. Marketing management and strategy roles sit mid-pack at 1.79.

Performance is the proving ground. It makes sense: performance marketing has tight feedback loops, measurable outputs, and tasks AI is genuinely good at today. Strategy is harder to implement. But it does raise a question for every CMO reading this… if AI capability is concentrated in the functions you manage, what’s the plan for the function that manages them?

The double-whammy at the bottom rung

So AI work is being pulled up the ladder. On its own, that’s an interesting skew. What makes it a squeeze is what’s happening at the bottom at the same time — from both sides.

Side one: the old junior jobs are thinning out.

people2people’s March 2026 employment report found 45 per cent of employers expect to hire fewer junior roles over the next three to five years — up from 14 per cent. That’s not a gentle drift. That’s a tripling of intent.

Fifth Quadrant’s SME tracker has only 9 per cent of Australian small and medium businesses actively hiring as of December 2025, down from 19 per cent in October — and SMEs are where an awful lot of marketing careers have always started.

And Stanford’s “Canaries in the Coal Mine“ study (flag: US data) found a 16 per cent relative employment decline for 22-to-25-year-olds in the occupations where AI can do the most of the work. The Stanford research matters because it suggests this isn’t an Australian quirk or a temporary hiring cycle. Independent researchers, on a different continent, using different methods, found the same pattern: the first measurable employment effects of AI are landing on the youngest workers in the most AI-affected fields. The Australian Marketing Institute has already flagged the same dynamic for marketing here.

“The first measurable employment effects of AI are landing on the youngest workers in the most AI-affected fields.”

Side two: the new junior jobs haven’t been written yet.

If AI were simply reshaping entry-level work, you’d expect a new kind of junior ad to appear — the AI-junior role. The coordinator who runs the prompt library. The grad who owns the workflow automations. The entry-level marketer hired to be the team’s AI hands.

That ad barely exists. Junior ads are the least likely to mention AI at all, remember — 9.2 per cent.

Why? Our best answer after reading thousands of these ads: managers can’t define the role. Most marketing managers aren’t yet AI-literate enough to describe what an AI-native junior would actually do all day. And you can’t hire for what you can’t describe.

So traditional junior tasks are steadily being automated, while the new entry-level roles that should be designed around AI haven’t been created. The result is a gap between the jobs that are fading and the jobs that have yet to emerge — and it’s juniors standing in that gap.

The irony is brutal. Today’s graduates arrive with more AI experience than any cohort before them. And the market is hiring AI capability almost exclusively into senior and specialist roles — leaving the most AI-ready generation with the fewest professional opportunities to use it.

“The most AI-ready generation in history — with the fewest professional opportunities to use it.”

A junior with strong AI skills reporting to a manager who can’t evaluate them is like a brain surgeon being managed by a first-aider. The capability is there. The system doesn’t know what to do with it.

Hire, fire… re-hire?

There’s a plot twist forming in the data, and it’s one every finance director should read before signing off the next restructure.

people2people calls it the “AI-driven redundancy cycle“: up to half of the employers who cut customer service, admin and entry-level marketing headcount on the promise of AI may be forced to re-hire into similar roles by 2027. Cut on the promise, re-hire on the reality.

AHRI’s December 2025 Work Outlook shows the churn in one snapshot: 30 per cent of organisations expect redundancies — and 91 per cent of those same organisations plan to recruit in the same quarter. That’s not a shrinking workforce. That’s a workforce being shuffled, at considerable expense, by organisations that aren’t sure what they’re doing yet.

Agencies are bearing the brunt locally. The Advertising Council of Australia’s 2025 salary survey put the industry redundancy rate at 11 per cent, against a historical norm of 5 to 7 per cent. Add the Omnicom–IPG merger (around 4,000 roles globally) and local cuts at Nine and Seven West, and the private-sector marketing job market is doing plenty of firing while it talks about transforming.

And if the squeeze persists, the bill arrives later. Entry-level roles are where organisations have always grown their future specialists, managers and leaders. Narrow that pathway and you might solve this year’s headcount challenge — while quietly running a single-child policy on your own talent pipeline. Plenty of seniors today. Nobody is coming through tomorrow. Where exactly is the next generation of experienced marketing talent supposed to come from?

We’ve seen this movie before

If this all feels familiar, it should. It’s the digital-transformation wave with the labels swapped: loud claims, hiring that doesn’t match the claims, and a coming boom in “AI transformation” consultancies with the same mixed results as the last lot.

Even the optimistic data has a say/do gap buried in it. AHRI reports that 41 per cent of organisations claim AI is increasing entry-level roles. Encouraging — until you split it: 58 per cent of public-sector organisations say so, versus 37 per cent private. The optimism is concentrated exactly where commercial pressure isn’t. In private-sector marketing, the numbers point the other way.

Say/do gap, all the way down.

What the data doesn’t say

The data does not say AI is killing junior marketing jobs. Total marketing ad volume hasn’t collapsed. The churn data says organisations are re-hiring even as they cut. What the data describes is a bottom rung being rebuilt in place — narrower, more hybrid, more demanding, and not yet redesigned around the technology reshaping it.

The squeeze is real at the point of entry. The apocalypse framing is the same over-claim we caught in part one — just pointed at grads this time.

And what happens to graduates after that harder entry point — how the university pipeline is (and isn’t) preparing them, and what the longer-run outcomes actually look like — is a story big enough that we’re giving it a piece of its own. That’s part four.

What to actually do about it

If you run a marketing team, here are four recommended moves — none of them radical, but all of them rare.

Train the managers first. The junior AI role doesn’t exist because managers can’t describe it. Fix the describing problem before the hiring problem. You can’t write the JD for a job you don’t understand.

Don’t freeze the grad intake — redesign it. The cheapest response to uncertainty is to stop hiring juniors. It’s also the one that costs you a talent pipeline. Build different pathways instead: AI apprenticeships, explicit training commitments written into the ad.

Put AI development in junior JDs. Even as “willingness to learn AI tools” — Jobs & Skills Australia‘s digital-fluency framing is a ready-made starting point. Right now, 9 in 10 junior marketing ads are silent on AI. Silence tells the most AI-ready generation in history that you don’t want the thing they’re best at.

Build the fluency ladder. Coordinator to manager, with AI capability expected to grow at every step. The alternative is what part one found: juniors using AI anyway, under the radar, with no guardrails and no credit.

What’s next

This is the third of four pieces. Part one measured the say/do gap. Part two showed what good looks like. This one showed who’s being left out of it. Part four goes to where the pipeline starts: why 84.3 per cent of Australian university marketing curricula still contain zero AI content — and why a couple of universities saw this coming years early.

If you’ve hired a junior marketer this year — or tried to be one — we’d genuinely love to hear how it went. Did the ad mention AI? Did the interview? Share your 2c.

For the interactive dataset: jobs.my2cents.com.au

A note on methodology

Our capability assessment scores marketing job ads that explicitly mention AI across four levels (Performative → Capable → Adoptive → Transformative), adapted from Zapier’s AI Fluency framework for the marketing function. Seniority is classified from job titles. Capability and distribution figures come from our frozen monthly cohorts (March–May 2026) of ads from leading Australian job boards; the any-mention rates by seniority are a broader measure than the built-around-AI rate and are labelled as such above. For the full methodology and data: jobs.my2cents.com.au.

The full series

Part one — The Say/Do Gap in AI Marketing Hiring · May 2026
Ninety-one per cent of Australian marketing businesses say they use AI. Just 3.5 per cent of job ads asked for it.

Part two — Everyone’s talking about AI. Only 21 of 979 marketing roles are actually built around it. · June 2026
What the companies that mean it actually write into the job description — and the four questions that tell you whether you should.

Part three — AI is climbing the marketing career ladder from the top down · you are here
AI capability is being hired in at the top. Of the 21 roles genuinely built around it, not one was entry-level.

Part four — AI has entered the university marketing syllabus mostly as something to police, not something to practise · September 2026
1,188 marketing subjects across 38 Australian universities. Six ask a student to prove they can direct an AI.

In part one of this series, we compared what Australian marketers say about AI with what their job ads actually ask for. Ninety-one per cent of Australian marketing businesses say they use AI (BizCover, 2025). Three in four leaders say they wouldn’t hire someone without AI skills (Microsoft / LinkedIn, 2024). Just 3.5 per cent of approximately 13,000 job ads mention it. The gap was the story.

This time, the exceptions tell the story.

A quick word on our position. We’re not making the case that every marketing team should be transformative. Most shouldn’t, and we’ll get to why. But given how much noise there is around AI, we expected to find far more of it embedded in the actual work. What surprised us was how patchy it is: where AI shows up, it tends to live in pockets, not across whole organisations — and often not in the companies making the most noise about it.

Note: For part two, we’ve updated our data, filtered for ads that explicitly mention AI as of 18 May 2026 - 961 marketing roles or 4.4% out of 22,000. Part one used an earlier April 2026 cut of 461 AI-mentioning ads of a total of 13,000.

We scored 979 Australian marketing job ads — roughly 1 in 20 of the 22,000 ads we analysed, that actually mention AI — against a four-level capability assessment. We read each ad structurally: what the company says about itself, how AI sits in the marketing context, and what the role actually requires day-to-day. Then we scored each layer independently and checked whether the company’s AI rhetoric matches the role’s reality.

Twenty-one of those 979 ads are for roles operating at a transformative level — the highest capability level. Three ads were active as of 18 May 2026. And the patterns in between are where it gets interesting.

The capability assessment, unpacked

In part one, we introduced a four-level framework for reading the market. Here’s what emerges when you apply this to the 979 job ads:

1. Performative. The company mentions AI somewhere — usually in the “about us” or as a bullet-point aspiration — but the role itself includes no AI work. Remove every mention of AI, and the job doesn’t change. This is the biggest category.

2. Capable. AI shows up as a nice-to-have: “experience with ChatGPT preferred”, “familiarity with AI tools a plus.” The candidate who has it might be marginally preferred. The candidate without could still get the job.

3. Adoptive. AI is embedded in the role. Named tools, defined workflows, expected outputs. “You will use AI tools to [specific task]” — not “awareness of AI trends.” AI has changed the day-to-day work of marketers.

4. Transformative. The role exists because of AI. The marketing function has been redesigned around AI capability. AI agents, proprietary systems, prompt libraries, retrieval architectures. Humans and AI are working together by design, not by accident.
   

We scored each ad across three dimensions — company behaviour, marketing context and function-specific signals — then assessed coherence: does the company’s talk match its walk? That single measure turns out to be one of the most powerful signals in the dataset. More on that shortly.

The numbers

Here’s how the market distributes across those four levels.

Of the 979 marketing job ads we scored, more than four in five sit at Performative or Capable. AI is a buzzword or a nice-to-have — not the job. Roughly 16 per cent are Adoptive — companies where AI has actually changed how marketing gets done. And just 2.1 per cent — twenty-one ads — are Transformative.

What Transformative actually looks like

Twenty-one Transformative roles out of 979. Just four were active as of 18 May 2026. Here’s what the top tier looks like up close — and why these aren’t necessarily the companies you’d expect.

The greenfield

This listing, posted through recruitment firm Six Degrees Executive, is for a high-growth B2B SaaS business making its first dedicated full-time marketing hire. The employer — operating at the intersection of AI, workflow automation and enterprise compliance technology, and trusted by Coca-Cola, Nike and Woolworths — didn’t retrofit AI into an existing team. They designed the function around AI from day one.

The job: AI-Led B2B Marketing Manager. The ask: “work with proprietary tooling and internal MCPs connected to platforms such as LinkedIn and Google Ads, helping drive growth while contributing to how AI agents and automations are orchestrated, governed and continuously improved.”

This isn’t “ChatGPT preferred.” This is a marketing function built around AI-enabled leverage. The employer’s marketing team is hired to use the same kind of AI orchestration the business sells to its clients. Internally consistent.

Why it’s Level 4: the role only exists because of AI — proprietary tooling and orchestrated agents are the job, not a bonus skill. • See the listing →

The survivalist: nimbl

nimbl is a boutique digital agency in Richmond, Victoria, specialising in SEO, AEO and GEO — search engine optimisation, answer engine optimisation, and generative engine optimisation — for clients navigating AI-driven search. Their job ad for an SEO Strategist says this:

“AI-native and well-versed in the latest platforms (Claude, Claude Code, Cowork, ChatGPT, Perplexity and similar). Every team member here uses AI daily, and we invest heavily in cutting-edge tooling, so we’re after someone who genuinely leans into the shift rather than works around it.”

For nimbl, Level 4 isn’t a flex. It’s a survival posture. When AI search is rewriting what their clients pay for — when ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity are the new front doors — the only honest response is to be better at AI than the technology that’s disrupting you. This is what high competitive necessity looks like at the functional level.

Why it’s Level 4: AI fluency is existential, not optional — the whole function is built to outrun the technology disrupting its market. • See the listing →

The one you wouldn’t expect: ansarada

ansarada doesn’t include AI in their about-us information. Their company-level AI positioning is modest — they’re a B2B SaaS for M&A deal management. But their Performance Marketing Specialist role says this:

“You use LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) daily — for copy, analysis, briefing, and reporting.”

And then: “We’re not looking for someone who’s planning to try AI one day. We’re hiring someone who already uses it to build smarter campaigns, find optimisation opportunities faster, and turn data into decisions without spending hours in a spreadsheet.”

The company scores modestly on AI positioning. The role scores Transformative on function-specific capability. This is the pattern we find most interesting — and the opposite of performative. A company that doesn’t talk about AI at the brand level, but whose marketing function runs on it. We’re calling this a function-led adopter.

Why it’s Level 4: quiet at the brand level, but the role demands daily LLM use across the whole workflow — the function runs on AI. • See the listing →

The paradox within one company

Microsoft is the most instructive case in our dataset. Not because they’re the best — but because they contain the full spectrum in one organisation.

Earlier this year, Microsoft’s AI Creative Director role — part of the Clipchamp and M365 Copilot team — scored Transformative across every layer. It asked for someone to “set the creative vision and quality standards for generative video systems.” That’s Level 4 work.

Right now, their Copilot Solution Play GTM Manager — a role that literally markets Copilot to enterprise customers — scores Performative on function-specific capability. The role sells AI. The role itself doesn’t use it day-to-day. Same brand. Same logo. Completely different AI demands depending on the function. This is why company-level AI positioning tells you almost nothing about what the actual jobs require. And it’s why we score at the function level, not the company level.

Don’t read the About page. Read the JD.

If the Microsoft case makes the point structurally, the pattern across the dataset makes it statistically. We identified 10 clear cases of AI washing — companies whose AI rhetoric significantly exceeds the role’s reality. A company literally named after artificial intelligence hired a traditional marketing director with zero AI requirements. An AI cybersecurity firm building autonomous penetration testing asked for a regional marketing manager with no AI in the job description. A world leader in data science and AI recruited a content marketer for thought leadership production — no AI tools, no AI workflows.

On the other side: we found 22 companies where the reverse is true — low-key at the brand level, genuinely AI-driven in the work. We’re calling them quiet adopters. And here’s the thing: this is fast becoming the norm, and that’s exactly the point. The loudest AI marketing isn’t where the real adoption lives.

Harvey Norman also deserves a mention. Three copywriter roles — two SEO, one eCommerce — all scored Adoptive on function-specific capability. Company-level AI positioning: zero. Harvey Norman doesn’t brand itself as an AI company. But their eCommerce copy team has quietly become an AI-augmented operation:

“Use AI tools and prompt crafting to improve efficiency, ideation and output quality. Human-led AI. Edit and refine AI-generated content with strong editorial judgement.”

No fanfare. No LinkedIn posts about being AI-native. Just the work.

The lesson is simple, and it cuts both ways. If you want to know which companies actually use AI in their marketing function, don’t read their About page. Read their job ads. The companies talking loudest about AI aren’t always the ones using it. The ones using it aren’t always talking.

Not everyone needs Level 4

So far this reads like a case for going Transformative. It isn’t.

Not every company needs to be transformative.

And the conversation is finally maturing past “transform or die.” The smartest marketing leaders we talk to aren’t chasing Level 4 for its own sake — they’re matching their AI ambition to their business and their function. It’s also worth repeating that a lot of what is reported right now as “AI transformation” isn’t. It’s large companies using consultants to find roles they can cut. That’s cost-cutting with an AI label on it — not a marketing function redesigned around what AI can actually do.

A recent piece by the CMO Alliance makes this point well. Their critique of the standard four-stage AI maturity model — where every company is assumed to progress linearly from stage one to stage four — can overlook organisational context. They propose four readiness vectors that determine what level of AI fluency a marketing function actually needs:

1. Competitive Necessity. Is AI reshaping your competitive landscape? For nimbl, the answer is existential — AI search is rewriting what their clients pay for. For a local construction firm’s marketing, it might be negligible.
   

2. Business Model Leverage. Does AI directly improve how you make money? If your marketing function is the growth engine — like a venture-scaled SaaS making its first marketing hire — AI leverage is high. If marketing is a support function in a services business, the calculation is different.
   

3. Organisational Capacity. Does your team have the infrastructure, skills and governance to adopt AI responsibly? A company with proprietary tooling already built has capacity. A company whose team hasn’t logged into ChatGPT does not.
   

4. Change Velocity. How fast is your market moving? Some industries have years. Others have months. SEO has weeks.
   

When all four vectors are high, Level 4 is justified — possibly necessary. When they’re mixed or low, Level 2 or Level 3 might be exactly the right answer. A retail eCommerce copy team, for instance, is well-calibrated at Adoptive: high business-model leverage (copy drives revenue), moderate competitive necessity, moderate change velocity. It doesn’t need Transformative AI; it needs to be good at what it does.

The question isn’t “are you Transformative?” It’s “should you be?”

Five questions for your next leadership meeting

We’ll close with something practical. Five questions you can take to your marketing team this week.

1. If you removed every AI mention from your current job ads, would the roles actually change? If not, you’re at Performative. That might be fine — but you should know it.

2. Do your marketing team members use AI tools daily — and does the organisation know about it? If the first answer is yes and the second is no, you have a shadow-AI problem, not an AI strategy.

3. Can you name the specific AI tools your team uses, what tasks they do with them, and who reviews the output? If yes, you’re at Adoptive. If the answer is “we’ve got some ChatGPT licences”, you’re at Capable.

4. Has AI changed what your marketing function can do — not just how quickly it does the same things? If it’s expanded the capabilities, you’re approaching Transformative. If it’s made existing tasks quicker, that’s Capable to Adoptive.

5. Does your competitive environment, business model, organisational capacity and change velocity justify the AI level you’re targeting? A Level 2 function with Level 2 vectors is well-calibrated. A Level 2 function with Level 4 vectors has a problem.

What’s next

This is the second of four pieces in this series. The capability assessment tells you what companies are doing. The readiness vectors tell you what they should be doing. Most Australian marketing functions are at Performative or Capable. For some, that’s a problem. For others, it’s the right answer.

Over the next two posts, we’ll look at what’s happening to junior marketing roles as AI capability concentrates at the leadership level — the squeeze is real and the consequences compound (part three). Lastly, we’ll look at the university story in detail: why 84.3 per cent of Australian marketing curricula still have zero AI content, and which two universities anticipated the shift (part four).

For the interactive dataset and capability assessment: jobs.my2cents.com.au

A note on methodology

Our capability assessment scores marketing job ads across three layers (company behaviour, marketing context, function-specific signals) and four levels (Performative → Capable → Adoptive → Transformative). We adapted Zapier’s AI fluency framework for the marketing function and applied it to 979 Australian marketing job ads from leading Australian job boards, filtered for ads that explicitly mention AI as of 18 May 2026. (Part one used an earlier April 2026 cut of 461 AI-mentioning ads.)

The readiness vectors framework is adapted from the CMO Alliance’s analysis of AI maturity models. For the full methodology and data: jobs.my2cents.com.au.

The full series

Part one — The Say/Do Gap in AI Marketing Hiring · May 2026
Ninety-one per cent of Australian marketing businesses say they use AI. Just 3.5 per cent of job ads asked for it.

Part two — Everyone’s talking about AI. Only 21 of 979 marketing roles are actually built around it. · you are here
What the companies that mean it actually write into the job description — and the four questions that tell you whether you should.

Part three — AI is climbing the marketing career ladder from the top down · July 2026
AI capability is being hired in at the top. Of the 21 roles genuinely built around it, not one was entry-level.

Part four — AI has entered the university marketing syllabus mostly as something to police, not something to practise · September 2026
1,188 marketing subjects across 38 Australian universities. Six ask a student to prove they can direct an AI.

These numbers shouldn’t add up in 2026. But they do.

91% of Australian marketing businesses say they use AI (BizCover, 2025). Three in four Australian business leaders say they wouldn’t hire someone without AI skills (Microsoft / LinkedIn Work Trend Index, 2024). Yet just 3.5 per cent of Australian marketing job ads ask for it (My2Cents Job Ads Analysis, Apr-2026)

Pick any two of those numbers, and the gap between them is enormous. Put all three together, and the contradiction is the whole story.

We went and looked at what Australian marketers — or the employers hiring them — are actually asking for in the job market. We analysed approximately 13,000 publicly available Australian marketing job ads from leading Australian job boards and filtered for ads that explicitly mention AI by name.

The answer: 3.5 per cent.

This isn’t a one-survey fluke. ADMA’s State of AI in Marketing 2026 (n=1,092) puts weekly AI use at 77 per cent and daily use at 52 per cent. Microsoft’s 2024 Work Trend Index puts AI use at work at 84 per cent across Australian knowledge workers. Everywhere you look, the “say” side is high. The “do” side — what employers write down — hasn’t moved.

And the part that made us stop and redo the numbers: the universities responsible for training the next generation of marketers are doing all three at once — using AI, hiring for it, yet rarely asking for it on paper. What’s more, they’re some of the more sophisticated users of AI, applying it to student recruitment and retention. More on that below.

What “performative AI” actually looks like

We built a four-level capability assessment to read these ads at scale (we’ll come back to the methodology). The bottom level we call Performative AI — roles where the employer markets itself as AI-driven, but the actual job description doesn’t need, require, or use AI.

We’re not naming and shaming. But we can describe the patterns cleanly, because they repeat.

The boilerplate twins. A major Australian education employer runs the line “access to targeted AI tools and training with a focus on innovation and strong ethical standards” in two unrelated school marketing roles. The actual duties — events, parent comms, and list-building — contain no AI work. When the same sentence appears verbatim in two job ads at the same organisation, it’s HR copy-paste.

The “AI-powered company, traditional role” move. A major creative asset platform uses the line “as AI transforms the creative landscape, we’re committed to building what’s next” in both a senior brand and social role and a senior CRM role. Neither JD asks for any AI capability. An Australian B2B data science business opens its content marketing JD, declaring itself “a world leader in data science and artificial intelligence” — then asks for thought leadership content production with zero AI tool mentions.

The job-board AI. In three content marketing roles in our dataset, the only AI mention in the entire ad is the recruiting platform’s own applicant-tracking algorithm. Your job is now AI-enabled because the job board’s back-end sorts résumés.

The “AI as elevator pitch” pattern. An AI-first B2B SaaS describes itself as building the world’s first AI-powered decision operating system. The role is junior marketing executive — content scheduling and event support.

In aggregate, this has two real consequences. Candidates searching “AI marketing roles” surface listings that have nothing to do with AI. And industry-level adoption statistics these ads feed into get inflated by language, not capability. The ad performs AI readiness. The job doesn’t require it.

Meet AI mentionitis

If performative AI is what ends up on the page, there’s a sibling condition that ends up in the meeting. We’re calling it AI mentionitis.

AI mentionitis is the manager who now prefaces every suggestion with “well, I asked Claude…”, or “Ben from accounts said ChatGPT said we should do this instead.” It’s the boss who used to drop client names, then consultancy names, and now drops AI tool names — as if the mention itself is the work. You know it when you see it. The comments section on any LinkedIn post about bad AI management reads like a support group.

It matters for the same reason performative AI matters: the claim to AI sophistication runs well ahead of the capability to back it up. Performative AI inflates the job market. Mentionitis inflates the company. Both are versions of the same thing — the say side of the gap running ahead of the do side. (A recent Substack post on exactly this phenomenon crystallised the pattern for us — worth a read.)

It’s also, for better or worse, the beat of corporate life in 2026. We’ll keep collecting examples. Send yours in.

The funnel — a way to read the market

We scored each AI-mentioning ad against a four-level capability assessment (we adapted Zapier’s AI Fluency Rubric to align more closely with the marketing function). Think of AI capability as a funnel: the top level is thick with language, the bottom is thin with actual capability. Most Australian marketing ads sit at the top two levels — and the numbers drop away quickly as real AI work enters the picture.

• Performative (Level 1). The ad mentions AI; the role doesn’t need it. The largest slice of AI-mentioning ads we’ve scored so far.

• Capable (Level 2). The role would benefit from AI fluency and lists one or two concrete tools or tasks. AI is a productivity helper, not a rethink.

• Adoptive (Level 3). The role explicitly redesigns workflows around AI. The marketer is expected to build prompt libraries, integrate tools across the stack, and lift team throughput.

• Transformative (Level 4). The role changes what’s possible — AI agents in the marketing function, retrieval systems wired into customer data, or new capabilities that didn’t exist two years ago. Extremely rare in Australian marketing right now.

An upcoming post will dig into what that Transformative tier actually looks like up close — the Australian companies hiring AI-fluent marketers properly. For now, just know the top of the funnel is performative.

Why do job ads lag? (The reasons don’t quite wash either.)

We don’t have definitive data on why the gap exists. But here are the likely explanations a hiring manager would offer — and a counter-question for each.

“We don’t need to put AI in the ad — it’s ubiquitous now.” Then how do you actually screen for it? If it’s not in the ad, candidates are less likely to include it — especially when they know their application is being screened by AI against the job description. The irony is that AI becomes invisible in the process designed to find it.

“We’ll just hire someone who picks it up on the job.” Like your existing team picked it up — quietly, without being asked, usually without being paid for the upskill. Are you running that play again for eighteen more months?

“We don’t have a company-wide position, so we won’t go out on a limb in the JD.” Fair. Which means the ad gets hedged, the marketer you hire hedges, and the gap persists another hiring cycle.

“It’s an old JD we haven’t updated.” Probably the most honest answer. The ATS was configured for 2022, the hiring manager is two rungs above day-to-day AI use, and the legal review flagged anything specific as a discrimination risk. Nobody’s wrong. Nothing moves.

“I use it daily. I’d never admit it at work.” A CMO at a large Australian employer told us this on a recent call. That’s the dynamic that creates shadow AI — and it’s in the same room as the data that says 91 per cent of marketing businesses use AI. Same gap, shorter distance.

None of these reasons are obviously wrong. Each one has a counterpoint that’s also not obviously wrong. The part worth noticing is that the reasons themselves carry the same say/do gap as the hiring data — and they probably always will, until the first hiring manager in each company decides to break the cycle and write the role at the Capable level.

The upside for marketers: if you use AI well, this is arbitrage. The demand is there — BizCover’s 91 per cent, Microsoft’s 75 per cent won’t-hire-without signal, ADMA’s 77 per cent weekly — it just hasn’t hit the job ads yet. Put AI on your CV in specifics, not adjectives.

Shadow AI is the symptom, not the disease

If 91 per cent of Australian marketing businesses use AI but only 3.5 per cent of marketing job ads ask for it, that gap has to land somewhere. It lands in shadow AI — employees using tools their employer hasn’t sanctioned, often on personal accounts, sometimes with client data in the prompt window.

Around one in four Australian employees are using AI tools without telling their managers (AHRI / HRM Magazine, December 2025). One in three Australian professionals regularly upload sensitive data to AI without oversight (Josys / Censuswide, September 2025). Only 30 per cent of Australian organisations have a workplace AI policy at all; 48 per cent of Australian employees admit using AI in ways that contravene company policies (KPMG / University of Melbourne, Trust in AI, September 2025). The State of AI in Australian HR report (QUT / AHRI, December 2024) found 27 per cent of Australian organisations have responded by banning generative AI outright — and the evidence says bans push shadow AI further underground, not out.

The instinctive read is that Australian professionals are risk-loving. They’re not. They’re operating in a policy vacuum. Only 13 per cent of marketers have had formal AI training (ADMA). IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report clocked an additional cost of about A$1 million on average when shadow AI is involved in a breach. That’s not a risk marketers are choosing to take — it’s one their employers have effectively outsourced to them by declining to write the policy.

The university paradox

This is where it gets serious.

In March 2026, we analysed publicly available course information across 32 Australian universities — 629 marketing subject outlines in total. Eighty-four point three per cent had zero AI content in the syllabus. The two standouts were Bond University at 79 per cent of marketing subjects mentioning AI, and the University of Queensland at 61 per cent. Nobody else was close.

At the same time, Australian universities were advertising for AI-fluent applicants. A sessional academic role at an Australian university asked for applicants who can “operate in an AI-ready educational environment” and bring “familiarity with the appropriate and ethical use of AI tools, as well as the ability to guide students in developing responsible AI practices” — with no clarity, anywhere, on what “AI-ready” or “ethical” actually means in the institution’s own syllabus. Another Australian university recruited a digital PR producer, asking for “AI-driven” SEO and content skills. A third advertised a lecturer in data science and AI, while its own marketing faculty’s coursework contained zero AI references.

If AI is as ubiquitous as the industry says it is, you’d expect to see it clearly in how universities present their marketing capability. In practice, it’s hard to find. If a university were to say “this doesn’t reflect our current position” — that’s fine. The question then becomes: why isn’t it visible? If it’s a priority, it should be easy to find.

We’ve chosen not to name the institutions behind these examples — it’s a system problem, not a vice-chancellor problem. But if you’re a marketing graduate in 2026, this is the world you’re walking into: the employer market is asking for AI fluency you almost certainly weren’t taught, and the institution that just awarded you the degree — and very likely used AI to help recruit you — is asking for AI skills from its own staff that it didn’t put in your syllabus.

Meanwhile, in April 2026, the Australian and NSW Governments committed $11 million to turn TAFE NSW Meadowbank — already a Microsoft-partnered training site — into a national Digital TAFE Centre of Excellence: 50,000 Australians a year, microcredentials co-designed with Microsoft, AWS and Cisco, AI threaded through the curriculum (DEWR, Digital TAFE Centre of Excellence for New South Wales, 14 April 2026). The vocational sector is moving. Marketing schools are not.

We’ll dig into the university story properly in an upcoming post.

What good actually looks like

Bond and UQ are the named exemplars, and it’s worth being specific about why. Bond’s 79 per cent isn’t one headline “AI in Marketing” unit — it’s AI threaded through the curriculum, showing up in consumer behaviour, analytics, digital marketing and strategy subjects. UQ’s 61 per cent looks similar. Integrated, not bolted on.

RMIT added two new AI-focused units — AI in Marketing and Enterprise AI and Business Analytics — to its Bachelor of Commerce in March 2026. Progress, and heading in the right direction.

ADMA and AHRI have been publicly ahead of the industries they represent. ADMA’s State of AI in Marketing is the cleanest benchmark in the market. AHRI has been visible and direct about shadow AI and has called on HR leaders to stop treating it as a discipline problem and start treating it as a policy one.

They’re organisations that treated AI as a curriculum choice or a governance choice and wrote it down.

What this means for you

We’ll close with three things, because that’s what we do at My2Cents — make a point, analyse the data, then make recommendations on what you can do with it.

If you use AI, include it on your CV, but be specific. Not “AI-savvy” or “passionate about AI”. The exact tools, tasks and outcomes. Your dream employer probably hasn’t put AI on the JD yet, but there’s a three in four chance your hiring manager will screen you out if you can’t demonstrate how you use it. Give them the language. You’re the arbitrage.

If you hire marketers, your job ads are almost certainly sending the wrong signal. “AI-powered company” in the boilerplate with zero AI specificity in the role description is filtering out the candidates you actually want. Write the role at the Capable level at minimum — one or two concrete tools and tasks — and watch who turns up.

If you run a marketing function, your shadow-AI usage is a governance risk. It’s already happening, on someone’s personal ChatGPT account, with company/client data in the prompt. Build a usable policy — not legal’s “don’t”, but a real “do this, in these tools, with this oversight” — before the breach, not after.

What’s next

This is the first of four pieces this month. Over the next three posts, we’ll show you:

• What good looks like. The Australian companies demonstrating AI fluency as a hiring requirement, and a self-assessment you can run against your own marketing function.

• The missing middle. What’s happening to junior marketing roles as AI gets pulled to leadership? The squeeze is real, and the consequences compound.

• The university story. Most Australian marketing courses still aren’t teaching AI. A handful are getting it right, the AI-ban paradox, and what marketing graduates are walking into.

The say/do gap won’t close on its own. It closes when individual marketers, hiring managers, curriculum leads and CMOs decide to put what they actually do with AI into what they say about it. Job ads. Syllabi. Policies. CVs.

A note on methodology

BizCover’s 91 per cent is a meaningful headline, and it deserves its caveat. It comes from a small-business sample of 92 marketing businesses in their 2025 Australian Small Business AI Report — a slice of their broader survey. The Microsoft / LinkedIn 75 per cent figure (”leaders would not hire without AI skills”) comes from the Australian leader subset of their Work Trend Index 2024. ADMA’s 77 per cent (n=1,092) and Microsoft’s 84 per cent Australian knowledge-worker figure corroborate the direction, at different samples and methodologies.

Our 3.5 per cent comes from approximately 13,000 publicly available Australian marketing job ads across leading Australian job boards between January and April 2026, filtered for ads that explicitly mention AI by name, and then scored against a four-level capability assessment. The university curriculum figures come from our March 2026 analysis of publicly available course information across 32 Australian universities and 629 marketing subjects.

For the full interactive dataset, head to jobs.my2cents.com.au.

The full series

Part one — The Say/Do Gap in AI Marketing Hiring · you are here
Ninety-one per cent of Australian marketing businesses say they use AI. Just 3.5 per cent of job ads asked for it.

Part two — Everyone’s talking about AI. Only 21 of 979 marketing roles are actually built around it. · June 2026
What the companies that mean it actually write into the job description — and the four questions that tell you whether you should.

Part three — AI is climbing the marketing career ladder from the top down · July 2026
AI capability is being hired in at the top. Of the 21 roles genuinely built around it, not one was entry-level.

Part four — AI has entered the university marketing syllabus mostly as something to police, not something to practise · September 2026
1,188 marketing subjects across 38 Australian universities. Six ask a student to prove they can direct an AI.

Watch or Listen | - YouTube | Spotify | My 2 Cents Podcast Episode #5 |

Much like Mark Twain, SEO has had its fair share of premature obituaries — and we think the rumours of its death ARE greatly exaggerated. Which is why this month, we’ve brought in someone who’s been proving that for more than two decades.
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We’re joined by our very special guest: Chris Hamlin, who is a 20+ year SEO veteran who’s worked across ecommerce, tech, travel and banking for brands including eBay, Harvey Norman, Suncorp and Tourism Australia. He’s also the founder of byMarketers.co, a go-to library of resources and templates for marketers — including ready-to-use GA4 and Looker Studio dashboards.

​

Has Google Killed SEO | Survey Results

​103 Aussie marketers contributed to our survey - thank you!

Q: We asked marketers how Google’s AI-driven search results have affected their website traffic?

Our survey results echo what we’re seeing globally: AI-driven changes to search are impacting marketers, but not in a uniform or catastrophic way. About half reported some level of traffic decline, while more than a third saw no change or even an increase — a reminder that the effects vary wildly by category and intent. And the 14% who were “unsure or haven’t measured it” offer a gentle reminder that marketers sometimes feel the impact of AI long before they bother to quantify it. Overall, it’s less an SEO collapse and more an uneven, early-stage shift.

According to our podcast guest, Chris Hamlin, this range of responses isn’t surprising: there has been a “permanent shift in traffic that will become the new normal”. However, AI hasn’t broken SEO, it’s just changed the rules again.

Q: We asked marketers how they are addressing the rise of AI-driven Search?

When we asked marketers what one change they’ve made to SEO or content in the age of AI, a clear theme emerged: don’t panic, get sharper. Some are levelling up authority with structured content and unique data that actually gives people a reason to click. Others are hedging their bets, turning top content into short videos and email to build traffic Google can’t intercept. And a growing group is watching the numbers differently — tracking when impressions rise but clicks don’t, a tell-tale sign that AI features are stepping in.

Bottom line: the best marketers aren’t ditching SEO — they’re evolving their strategy to keep pace with the changes. Acccording to Chris, this entails embracing AI for content generation, but judiciously checking verifiable facts and always ensuring that’s there a unique, human layer.

Thanks for taking part.

Cheers

Chris & Denise

Watch or Listen | My 2 Cents Podcast Episode #4

In this episode, our guest is James Hurman, one of the world’s leading voices on marketing effectiveness. ANZ entrepreneur, investor and author, he’s built and backed brand-led startups, advised global giants and helped rewrite the rules of what makes marketing actually work. Our conversation didn’t disappoint. Spoiler alert: if you’re like the majority of the marketers who responded to our Brand Vs Performance survey, you might like to re-think your strategy : )

Brand Vs Performance | Survey Results

103 Aussie marketers contributed to our survey - thank you!

Q: We asked marketers how much budget they allocated to Performance and brand in the last 12 months.

Our survey shows Aussie marketers are broadly in line with global peers — with most leaning heavily toward performance, with around 60–80% of spend focused on short-term activity, while only a small group report a balanced or brand-led approach.

As our podcast guest James Hurman explains, while a bias toward performance may feel sensible, it can quietly limit long-term growth. Decades of evidence show the most effective marketers invest slightly more in brand than performance, using each to play a different role over time.

“Think of marketing like an investment portfolio,” James said. “Performance delivers short-term liquidity, but brand is the equity that compounds your future returns.”

The takeaway? It’s not about choosing one over the other — it’s about balancing today’s results with tomorrow’s growth.

Q: We asked about the single biggest challenge in building long-term brand and short term performance ?

Marketers told us their biggest barriers are short-term pressure, tight budgets and difficulty proving brand ROI. Many said brand spend is the first to be questioned or cut when results aren’t immediate.

Many marketers also find themselves using performance spend as a safety net — as a reliable way to replace the reach once delivered by SEO and content marketing (channels that are heavily impacted by AI).

James sees this as a universal tension. Performance campaigns show quick wins, so they feel safer, but they can also create a cycle of short-termism that limits future demand.

“Brand investment isn’t risky — it’s proven to return three to six times what you put in,” he said. “The real risk is not investing at all.”

His advice: treat brand building like R&D — an investment in future demand, not a cost to be managed down.

Standing Still Isn’t An Option

​If most of your spend still leans toward performance, it might be time to start rebalancing. Even a small shift toward brand can make a big difference over time.

It’s also worth lifting your view beyond the quarter. The brands that grow are the ones that stay consistent — building recognition and trust long before someone’s ready to buy.

AI isn’t going away. It’s already changed how people search and make choices. In the world of algorithms, strong brands will be the ones the machines remember.
​

We’re crowdsourcing the answer in a lightning-fast, 2-question survey (🕑 < 2-min).

Share an unconventional experiment that drove real upside for you, and we’ll send the aggregated results & top experiments so you can steal with pride.

Ready to see where you stand?

TAKE THE 2-MINUTE SURVEY

Thanks
Chris & Denise

Watch or Listen | My 2 Cents Podcast Episode #4

In this episode we’re joined by Christian Young – founder of the award-winning Lord Howe Island Distilling Co. and board director of the Australian Distillers Association. After years in senior product marketing roles at some of Australia’s biggest tech and telco brands, Christian made the bold leap from corporate life to crafting some of the country’s finest gin and boutique beer. We dive into his journey, what makes LHIDC so unique, and how email marketing fits into growing a premium small business. Along the way, we share insights from this month’s community survey: Email – the OG of Digital Marketing.

Email: the OG of Digital Marketing | Survey Results

103 Aussie Marketers contributed to our survey - thank you!

Q: We asked marketers about the email’s revenue contribution

Email marketing is one of the most powerful digital channels in Australia, yet many businesses may be underestimating its potential. While only 1 in 3 Australian businesses include email in their marketing mix, it’s second only to organic social media. For businesses using email, it drives an average of 25% of sales – four times more than any other digital marketing channel.

Our survey reveals a slightly different picture:

• 31% of businesses derive less than 10% of revenue from email marketing
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• A further 26% report earning between 11–25% of revenue from email.

The maths on this is pretty simple: more than half of Australian businesses derive less than 20% of their income from email. A further 19% are unsure of emails revenue contribution. This suggests a couple of different scenarios:

• While some digitally savvy businesses and online retailers are achieving strong results, there’s a clear gap for others to close. Tapping into email’s revenue-driving power could represent a major opportunity.
  ​

• Are businesses focused on the right metrics? While direct revenue (last click) may be a good fit for E-commerce, more nuanced analysis might be needed to understand how email serves brand performance (and indirectly, sales).

Q: We asked what email tactics were most successful?

Our results show that segmentation and personalisation are the clear winners when it comes to email marketing success, with automation and abandoned cart tactics strong performers as well. And it’s not just us – international trends back this up too. Studies consistently rank segmentation, personalisation and automation as the most effective strategies for driving results.

It’s a strong reminder that a “one-size-fits-all” approach to email is rarely enough – the more relevant and tailored your emails, the better they perform.
​
Key Takeaways: We will leave you with three interesting quotes to ponder:

1. Automation keeps leads warm without us babysitting the inbox​

2. Abandoned cart emails practically pay our monthly email software bill by themselves!

3. The monthly newsletter keeps us top‑of‑mind; it’s not a quick win but it builds trust, especially for our B2B clients.

Watch or Listen | Youtube or Spotify | My 2 Cents Podcast Episode #3

In this episode, our guest is Zac King, Fractional VP Sales and Founder of the Fractional Exec Community. With experience in GTM strategy, building outreach campaigns, and pipeline reviews, he gave us lots of great insights into the role of email in the current digital marketing landscape.

Email: the OG of Digital Marketing | Survey Results

103 Aussie Marketers contributed to our survey - thank you!

Q: We asked marketers about the email’s revenue contribution

Email marketing is one of the most powerful digital channels in Australia, yet many businesses may be underestimating its potential. While only 1 in 3 Australian businesses include email in their marketing mix, it’s second only to organic social media. For businesses using email, it drives an average of 25% of sales – four times more than any other digital marketing channel.

Our survey reveals a slightly different picture:

• 31% of businesses derive less than 10% of revenue from email marketing
  ​

• A further 26% report earning between 11–25% of revenue from email.

The maths on this is pretty simple: more than half of Australian businesses derive less than 20% of their income from email. A further 19% are unsure of emails revenue contribution. This suggests a couple of different scenarios:

• While some digitally savvy businesses and online retailers are achieving strong results, there’s a clear gap for others to close. Tapping into email’s revenue-driving power could represent a major opportunity.
  ​

• Are businesses focused on the right metrics? While direct revenue (last click) may be a good fit for E-commerce, more nuanced analysis might be needed to understand how email serves brand performance (and indirectly, sales).

Q: We asked what email tactics were most successful?

Our results show that segmentation and personalisation are the clear winners when it comes to email marketing success, with automation and abandoned cart tactics strong performers as well. And it’s not just us – international trends back this up too. Studies consistently rank segmentation, personalisation and automation as the most effective strategies for driving results.

It’s a strong reminder that a “one-size-fits-all” approach to email is rarely enough – the more relevant and tailored your emails, the better they perform.

Key Takeaways: we will leave you with three interesting quotes to ponder:

• Automation keeps leads warm without us babysitting the inbox
  ​

• Abandoned cart emails practically pay our monthly email software bill by themselves!
  ​

• The monthly newsletter keeps us top‑of‑mind; it’s not a quick win but it builds trust, especially for our B2B clients.

Hi Reader,
​
​Has Google just pulled the rug out from under SEO?

Latest (July’25) research from Pew Research Centre shows some significant user changes with AI Summaries

If your organic traffic has taken a hit or even seen a bump, this 2-question survey is for you.

We’re collecting insights on how Aussie marketers are adapting to Google’s AI-generated summaries, ChatGPT, and the changing SERP landscape.

Takes <60 seconds. Helps us all see the bigger picture.

TAKE THE 2-MINUTE SURVEY

Thanks
Chris & Denise

Watch or Listen | Youtube or Spotify | My 2 Cents Podcast Episode #2

In this episode, our guest is Taz Bareham, former fractional and now full-time CMO of Fair Supply. She gave us way more than 2 cents’ worth as she shares practical advice on how she’s using AI every day in her work and her life.

AI for Marketing | Survey Results

103 Aussie Marketers contributed to our survey - thank you!

Q: We asked marketers, what’s their go-to AI tool?

Our second poll responses were no great surprise. ChatGPT leads the pack with 58% of users — likely driven by their first-mover advantage and brand familiarity. Claude (23%) and Gemini (13%) trail in its wake. For now.

​

The remaining 6% of “other” could point to a broader ecosystem of AI tools that marketers are exploring — often embedded in platforms such as Google Workspace, Canva, Hubspot and others.

Are we entering an era where marketers will assemble their own AI stacks — picking tools for specific tasks rather than relying on a single go-to? At this stage, there’s no fixed answer, but it’s clear that experimentation is well underway.

Q: What are the primary use cases for AI?

​The top use cases aren’t surprising: written content (26%), personalisation (25%) and data analysis (23%) led the way — all areas where AI can drive speed, scale and smarter outputs.

What’s more interesting is what didn’t rise to the top. Some of the more obvious applications — including SEO and automation — are still flying under the radar. Are these underused, undervalued or simply happening in the background without conscious attention?

And beyond the categories, the most compelling insights came from how AI is actually being used: to mine podcasts for thought leadership, act as a sounding board or editor and streamlining the leap from customer interviews to strategy. These aren’t just time-savers — they hint at a deeper shift in how marketers think, create and collaborate.

The real power of AI may not be in accelerating our work — but in rewiring how we think before we even begin.
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Key Takeaways: maybe the most profound shift AI brings isn’t faster content — but a new kind of thinking behind it. As marketers, we’re not just outsourcing execution — we’re reimagining the creative process itself. AI is becoming less of a tool we use at the end, and more of a partner we engage from the start.

The future isn’t just about what we do with AI, but how we work with it — creatively, critically, and consciously.

Watch or Listen | Youtube or Spotify | My 2 Cents Podcast Episode #1

In this episode, our guest is Michelle Kvello, Fractional CFO & founder of Lantern Partners, named one of the Top 50 Women in Accounting. We’re discussing marketing budgets, how they’re set and how they’re typically spent.

Marketing Budgets - Survey Results

103 Aussie Marketers contributed to our survey - thank you!

Q: What is your total annual marketing budget

Our first-ever marketing survey yielded some interesting results! Most of our respondents are smaller businesses with modest marketing budgets, with less than 5% spending more than $250K annually.

Q: How is your marketing budget set?

Unsurprisingly, most businesses set marketing budgets as a fixed percentage of revenue. As much as marketers often like to believe that they decide the overall allocation, it’s most commonly decided by the owner or CEO of the business and is highly dependent on the company’s fiscal health. The reasons cited for the fixed percentage model include the ability to scale allocations with revenue attainment as well as simplifying and integrating with broader company-wide financial plans.

Marketers spend on average between 10-13% of revenue on marketing, with a broad correlation of % spend and company size: the larger the organisation, the bigger the spend.

Q: How is your marketing budget allocated?

As we anticipated, it appears that rumours of the demise of email are greatly exaggerated! Here are the top three channels:

1. Email
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   ​This is seen as the most cost-effective channel for all types of business and is used to acquire and nurture new leads and existing customers. The ability to more accurately measure ROI supports its dominance — which was also noted by Hubspot in their State of the Marketing Report 2024 (both email and paid social were tied at #2 as the most effective channels, resulting in the largest ROI).
   ​

2. Content Marketing​
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   Content is still king, focusing on delivering helpful, educational or entertaining content. AI now plays a major role, especially for smaller businesses, offering tools to streamline the generation of ideas and content creation — traditionally, these were common challenges.
   ​

3. Paid Social​
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   Somewhat surprisingly, paid social has pipped paid search for third spot. This shift suggests that marketers are prioritising awareness and engagement, together with social media’s range of interactive formats. As one of our respondents says: “I can quickly increase brand exposure, accurately target audiences and enhance brand engagement”.
   ​
   ​Takeaway: Paid social platforms — still primarily Facebook and Instagram — are especially cost effective for smaller businesses. We’ve also noted this trend with our clients: as CPMs are levelling out or even declining, there are opportunities to effectively target and run balanced brand and lead generation campaigns.

Hello, possums!

Back in the day, your opinion was only worth 2c. With inflation, your insights are now priceless, especially for other marketers who are flying solo or are working as part of a small marketing team.

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