How AI is affecting marketing roles - according to HBR
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI Ready CMO
A new Harvard Business School study just put numbers on something the industry has been nervously avoiding: exactly which marketing roles the public is fine with AI replacing, and which ones will trigger an immediate backlash if you try. The answers are uncomfortably specific.
Researchers surveyed over 2,300 Americans about 940 occupations, measuring both technical feasibility and moral resistance to AI replacement. The gap between what AI can do and what people think it should do is wider than you’d expect, and marketers sit right in the middle of that tension. Search marketing strategists, for example, scored a 2.31 out of 7 on the “moral repugnance” scale—meaning the public is perfectly fine with AI doing that work. File clerks, data entry workers, and transportation planners occupy similar territory. These roles are both technically automatable and morally uncontroversial. No one is organizing protests to save the sanctity of keyword bidding.
But here’s where it gets interesting for anyone building campaigns or creating content: actors scored 5.01 on that same scale. Not because AI can’t generate performances—it increasingly can—but because people find the idea fundamentally wrong. The resistance isn’t about quality; it’s about principle. The study found that 12% of occupations face this kind of categorical rejection, and they’re clustered around care work, emotional labor, creative expression, and moral authority. When Coca-Cola used AI-generated Christmas ads or that Guess ran fully synthetic models without disclosure, the backlash wasn’t “this looks bad.” It was “this feels like a betrayal.”
This picture feels like a betrayal.
What makes this research actually useful is the framework it provides. The authors distinguish between performance-based resistance—concerns that fade as AI gets better—and principle-based resistance that persists regardless of capability.
Most marketing tasks fall into the first category. People don’t morally object to AI writing email subject lines or optimizing ad spend. They object when it replaces human creativity or authenticity in ways that feel like shortcuts. The study’s “moral friction” quadrant—roles that are technically automatable but socially unacceptable—is where brands keep stepping on rakes. AI can generate a celebrity endorsement or write a brand manifesto, but should it? The data suggests your customers have already decided.
The practical question isn’t whether to use AI in marketing—that ship has sailed—but where to draw the line between efficiency and erosion of trust. Automating media buying? No one cares. Generating your brand’s entire creative campaign without human involvement? You’re in contested territory. The research suggests the public is far more permissive than the discourse implies, but that permission is conditional and unevenly distributed. If your AI use feels like it’s replacing judgment, taste, or human connection rather than just accelerating it, you’re probably in the zone where technical capability and social acceptability diverge. That gap is where reputational damage lives.
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