AI takes the junior work in comms first.

Forrester expects roughly 15% of agency-side marketing and communications roles to be automated in 2026. The demand that remains is for strategy and judgement.

Michael Reaney  ·  1 September 2026  ·  3 min read

A headline number, with caveats

Jodie Cook, writing in Forbes on 20th August, argued that AI agents have already displaced around 10,000 marketing jobs. The piece is a contributor's analysis, not a controlled study, and its count leans mainly on Forrester's estimate that roughly 15% of agency-side marketing and communications roles will be automated in 2026. The layoffs already reported at WPP and Omnicom are offered as early evidence. The precise figure deserves scepticism; the direction it points in has more support.

What is disappearing

The roles going first are concentrated at the junior end: drafting variants, producing routine assets, monitoring coverage, compiling reports. This is the work AI systems now do quickly and cheaply, and it is the work agencies have historically staffed with large junior teams. The same analyses find demand moving in the opposite direction, towards people who can set strategy, brief the systems well and judge whether what comes back is any good.

What it means for leadership communications

For a leadership-communications programme the split matters, because the two layers were never equally valuable. The production layer, making the assets, is becoming fast and cheap. The judgement layer is not: deciding what a leader should say, whether a claim survives scrutiny, and whether a text sounds like the person who signs it remains slow, human work. The same standard now shapes how leaders talk about AI itself: provable claims with a named human accountable for the text.

In our own production work the pattern is visible week to week. The mechanical work has accelerated, while the editorial gate, a named person reading every claim before it goes out, takes as long as it ever did. That gate is where the value of the function now concentrates.

The planning question

Teams planning 2027 budgets and headcount tend to start from volume: how much content is needed and how many hands it takes. The analyses above suggest the more durable question is where judgement sits in the workflow, who holds it, and whether it is documented well enough to survive the people currently providing it.