AI in Marketing and the Fight for Purpose

That was the thought I left with after the launch of Purpose and Work: How Purpose Supports Motivation, Productivity and Performance at Work by Jessika Zwaan. The book makes a point many leaders still treat as secondary: perks, pay and polished employer branding are not enough to build motivated, high-performing teams. People need to understand why their work matters.

For marketers, that lands with force.

The next marketing divide is not skill. It is purpose.

We often describe the AI transition in practical terms: workflows, prompts, agents, automation, scale. All true. But these are surface changes. The deeper split is psychological.

Two types of marketer are emerging.

The first sees AI as a threat to their relevance and responds with fear, compliance or quiet resignation. The second sees AI as a forcing function, a brutal but clarifying moment to redefine where human value sits.

The difference is not raw technical ability. It is whether a marketer can reconnect their work to a purpose that still feels worth pursuing.

That matters because purpose is not decoration. It is performance.

McKinsey has found that people who say they are living their purpose at work are six times more likely to want to stay at their company, four times more likely to report higher engagement, and six-and-a-half times more likely to report higher resilience. Its research also shows that purpose-driven companies tend to have more engaged employees.

In other words, purpose is not what remains after transformation. In healthy organisations, it is what makes transformation survivable.

AI is accelerating faster than meaning can catch up

This is where the tension becomes sharp.

AI adoption in marketing is moving quickly, but not evenly. ISBA research reported by Marketing Week found that the share of advertisers with at least one live generative AI use case rose from 9% in 2024 to 41% in 2025, with another 27% experimenting.

Yet the same report found that efficiency was the main driver, with 62% prioritising time and money savings. Separately, Marketing Week reported in January 2026 that 51.7% of B2B marketers recognised an AI skills gap in their teams. Gartner said in February 2025 that 27% of CMOs reported limited or no GenAI adoption in marketing campaigns, even as many adopters were using it for creative development tasks.

So marketers are left in an awkward middle state: expected to embrace a new operating model before they have emotionally, ethically or professionally made sense of it.

That is why so many teams feel strangely busy but spiritually untethered. They are learning new systems without being given a new story for why their work matters.

And when organisations fail to provide that story, people write their own. Usually in the language of self-protection.

The danger is not AI. It is purposeless AI.

There is a lazy narrative spreading through business that marketers simply need to “adapt or die”. I’ve quoted that myself recently.

It sounds hard-headed. It sounds modern. It sounds like strategy.

But it is incomplete.

Because adaptation without purpose is just survival.

And survival is a dreadful long-term operating system for creative work, if marketing as a function remains a creative discipline and not a technical one.

Research on corporate purpose repeatedly shows a gap between saying the right things and living them. McKinsey has warned that executives are far more likely than other employees to say their purpose is fulfilled by work, revealing a serious “purpose hierarchy gap”. Its work on healthy organisations also argues that leaders must create a common purpose by showing employees the “why”. When that does not happen, purpose becomes slogan, not structure.

This matters in marketing because ours is a craft built on belief. We ask audiences to care. We ask markets to trust. We ask customers to feel. If the people doing that work no longer believe in the meaning of their own contribution, the work becomes thinner, flatter and more disposable.

That is also why consumer trust now belongs in this conversation. Gartner reported in March 2026 that 50% of US consumers would prefer to give their business to brands that avoid using GenAI in consumer-facing content.

That does not mean brands should reject AI. It means marketers cannot treat AI use as neutral. The more synthetic the output becomes, the more human judgement, transparency and taste matter.

The marketers who thrive will shift from production to meaning

Here is the challenge.

For years, many marketers built identity around output. Campaigns shipped. Content produced. Calendars filled. Assets scaled. AI is now attacking that layer of value at speed.

If your professional self-worth rests only on making things quickly, the machine will always look frightening.

But if your purpose sits one level higher, AI becomes less of a rival and more of a mirror.

It forces the question: what is the distinctly human contribution now?

My view is this: the future of meaningful marketing work will centre on five human powers AI cannot own in the same way.

That is not a sentimental defence of humanity. It is a commercial one.

McKinsey’s 2025 global AI survey said organisations most often reported the greatest revenue benefits from AI in marketing and sales, while also arguing that AI’s wider workplace potential depends on empowering people, not merely installing tools.

The marketer of the future will therefore not be the person who produces the most.

It will be the person who makes the machine useful without letting it hollow out the meaning of the work.

Purpose will become more personal, not less

One of the most useful ideas in your framing is that people often find purpose through career building, belief in a mission, or something more personal. That feels exactly right for this moment.

As AI reshapes marketing roles, purpose may detach from the employer brand and root itself more firmly in the individual.

That shift is already visible in younger workers. Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found that 89% of Gen Zs and 92% of millennials say a sense of purpose is important to job satisfaction and wellbeing. The same survey says these generations are increasingly defining career success around growth, flexibility and wellbeing rather than simply climbing to the top.

That has huge implications for marketing leaders.

You cannot automate trust into a team.

You cannot ask for creativity while designing work that feels emotionally empty.

PERMA offers a better response than panic

This is where the PERMA model becomes genuinely useful, not as therapy language, but as a design principle for modern marketing work.

Martin Seligman’s PERMA framework defines flourishing through five measurable elements: Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment. The University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center describes these as building blocks of wellbeing and flourishing.

Applied to AI in Marketing, PERMA creates a practical test.

This matters because Self-Determination Theory still holds a powerful lesson for leaders: people are more motivated when they feel autonomy, competence and relatedness, rather than control. The American Psychological Association’s summary of the theory highlights those three drivers clearly.

That gives leaders a blunt but useful question to ask.

Because that answer will shape not just adoption, but identity.

The final impact of AI on marketers’ purpose

So, what will AI ultimately do to marketers’ sense of purpose?

It will divide it.

For some, AI will strip work of meaning. They will experience a slow erosion: less craft, less ownership, less belief, more output, more anxiety. They may remain employed, but detached. They will do marketing without feeling called to it.

For others, AI will refine purpose. It will remove parts of the role that were never the point. It will expose that their real value was never in formatting, producing and polishing at industrial scale. It was in seeing what matters, deciding what is right, and moving people with honesty and imagination.

That is why I no longer think the final destination is “marketers who adapt” and “marketers who die”.

I think the real split is between marketers who let AI reduce their work to function, and marketers who use AI to raise their work back to meaning.

That is the challenge this moment presents.

And it is why Jessika Zwaan’s book feels so timely.

Because in an AI-shaped future, purpose will no longer be a comforting cultural extra. It will become the line between those who merely cope with the transition and those who emerge from it more human, more valuable and more alive in their work.

Marketers should not only ask how to adopt AI.

They should ask, more bravely, what kind of purpose they are willing to build around it.

Reflect on that before you redesign your workflow.