Transforming Consumer Industries in the Age of AI 2025

What leaders need to do The reality is that the impact on jobs will likely be complex and multifaceted, with AI expected to drive job creation, job displacement and job evolution. Based on a recent survey, 95% of leaders agreed that genAI will in fact create new jobs in their workforce.37 However, with 58% of workers citing job displacement as a concern, leaders will need a new organizational construct – one that cultivates continual change with the long term in mind.38 AI-driven automation and reinvention can create clear short-term opportunities to cut costs through headcount reduction. Leaders need to balance those opportunities with their vision for the reinvented enterprise, first considering future needs and emerging roles rather than cutting headcount prematurely. This construct should centre on skills-based careers in a hybrid (human-plus-machine) workforce, where organizations map the AI skills needed for future roles. For example, there’s a rising need for individuals who can work fluently with LLM models to develop those models’ specialities, setting up their training and maintenance. Leaders will need to lean towards redeployment rather than replacement while reaffirming what they already know – that, ultimately, a company cannot reach a market leadership position through cost-cutting. A far more powerful differentiator, highly efficient resource allocation, yields better value through innovation. Consider, for example, a conservative view of how roles and work could shift in an AI-augmented marketing function (Figure 19). A brand manager might become a relevance strategy manager, a brand experience designer or a consumer market intelligence manager, with skills including AI-driven market insight and segmentation. These shifts would create additional capacity, which leaders could potentially redeploy to areas supporting new value creation. Illustrative examples of how work and roles might be reallocated in a generative AI future, freeing capacity in the marketing functionFIGURE 19 Today’s role Future role Additional capacity Marketing organizationToday’s work and roles: 1 00 Marketing organization CX agency Media agency Creative agencyFuture work and roles: 75Future Work & Roles: 75 Research manager 3Content creator 10Strategy manager 5 Creative lead 5 Account manager 3Research manager 1Media manager 4 Insights manager 7Brand manager 8Content creator 8 Customer data manager5Marketing operations manager15 Research manager 3 Media buyer 10Account manager 3Data & analytics manager5 Media strategist 5Relevance strategy manager2 Brand experience designer4 Strategy manager10 Creative lead5 Account experience lead4 Media buyer6Marketing operations manager10 Consumer & market intelligence manager14Content creator12 Consumer experience orchestrator4 Audience optimizer4 25Additional capacity Based on a recent survey, 95% of leaders agreed that genAI will in fact create new jobs in their workforce. However, with 58% of workers citing job displacement as a concern, leaders will need a new organizational construct – one that cultivates continual change with the long term in mind. Note: CX = Customer experience. Source: Accenture. Transforming Consumer Industries in the Age of AI 25