Eric Siu argues marketers need to become T-shaped: deeply skilled in one area like SEO while competent across copywriting, email, and paid media. The future role is managing AI agents, letting machines handle routine tasks while you focus on strategy and human judgment.
You have to make sure that the work that you're doing, you're no longer just operating as a specialist. So let's say my background, I started as an SEO initially. I went very deep in SEO, but I started to learn over time, what is copywriting? How do we do webinars? How do we do email marketing? How do we do paid media? How do you do conversion optimization? How do you think about VSLs and human psychology? There's all these things that you have to learn over time. So you have to become a T-shaped marketer where you are, you're well-rounded, you're deep in one area, but you're well-rounded. And that's the future. In fact, when we think about hiring marketers now, we only hire what I'm calling for deployed marketers. These are basically business consultants that can be basically directors of marketing at other companies, right? And so they're very deep in one area. They might be deep in paid media, they might be deep in creative, but they know how to speak to other areas. As an AI generalist, you're going to know how to pilot these other agents. You're going to know how to command these other agents, and you have to become a manager of agents. This is the way in terms of how we're going to work in the future. You're going to be just managing a bunch of agents and you're going to be working with other smart humans, but you are going to be focused on doing only human things. And you're going to be building these agents. You're going to be tweaking these agents over time, and that's going to be the future of work. I'm telling you, it's way more fun working that way.
