How Will AI Impact My Career

I study Public Relations and Advertising not because I know exactly what my future role will be, but because I know I fit the required skillsets. These skills can fulfill many different roles within a company, and I am confident that AI will not replace them due to the essential personal aspect of these industries.

Public Relations is vital to client management because consumers want to feel valuable enough to merit a human being's attention. When issues arise, people expect companies to assign a person to solve them, not a computer. Furthermore, Public Relations goes far than simply managing crises or fixing mistakes; it is about understanding cultural shifts and what the general public wants to see. A computer cannot interpret those ideas with the same level of detail as a human, which creates long term job security.

The industry is currently using AI to speed up and assist with tasks, but not as a total replacement for professionals. As Grant McLaughlin of the PRSA noted, it is up to "PR professionals to leverage AI’s computational and regenerative power while maintaining the human touch that makes communications most effective."

A second field I would love to enter is advertising. While AI can create ads or build marketing plans, I believe those ads would flop without a human brain to generate original concepts. The advertising world continues to move in new directions because humans are able to come up with fascinating, novel ways to connect with audiences. AI can recreate what already exists, but it cannot create what has not been invented yet.

In order for advertising to avoid becoming stale, humans must remain at the center of it. Personally, I am a strategist—someone who generates ideas and helps shape the vision of an ad rather than a "behind the scenes" designer. Those technical roles may face less job security as AI advances, because someone like me could take an original idea and use AI to generate high quality mockups or the final creative itself. While graphic designers in agencies currently give ideas life and offer different perspectives through their mockups, AI is becoming capable of providing those same changes and recommendations. Consequently, it very well may displace some of those technical positions.