Will AI replace marketers, or will it make them stronger?

Artificial intelligence is no longer a topic of the future - it is already part of the present of marketing, business, and communications. But what does this mean for the marketing profession?

Career Daily News reached out to leading marketing professionals - marketing directors, experts, and representatives of agencies and companies - with one key question:

“How do you think AI will change the role of the marketing professional over the next 2-3 years - will it be a threat to the profession or the most powerful tool in marketers’ hands?”

The responses reveal different perspectives, but also one common trend: the future of marketing will not be about choosing between humans and technology. Instead, it will depend on the ability to use AI in a way that frees up time for the most valuable human skills — strategy, creativity, critical thinking, understanding people, and decision-making.

We give the floor to our special guests:

Dr. Nenad Lozovich (Chairman, New Moment | Lecturer, New Bulgarian University)

"I would start with the obvious, on which the marketing industry has already reached a near-consensus. AI analyzes, creates, optimizes and automates, and the rise of AI agents now makes it possible to delegate entire sequences of tasks rather than just individual operations. This allows one person to do in hours work that until recently required days, and sometimes an entire team. It is equally clear that AI does not eliminate the need for expertise. In the hands of a good specialist it multiplies their capabilities; in the hands of a superficial one it may simply accelerate the wrong decision. In marketing this is not a new problem. We have long known "garbage in, garbage out" — a bad brief rarely leads to good work. If we have defined the wrong problem, set the wrong goal or are optimizing the wrong KPI, AI will simply help us do the wrong thing faster, cheaper, and probably with a far more convincing presentation.

AI is also democratizing the marketing process itself. Things that until recently required specialized people, serious budgets and time are becoming accessible to practically everyone. That is wonderful, but when we all have roughly the same tools, the tool itself quickly ceases to be a competitive advantage. And if similar models lead us toward similar, statistically most probable solutions, the question is no longer who has AI, but who knows what to do with it. It is precisely these second-order consequences that I find more interesting.

One question that arises, for example, is the future of agencies. The trend toward in-house models will probably intensify, and the logic of "why do we need an agency when we can do it ourselves?" will sound ever more convincing. Except that it then becomes harder to blame the external partner when something doesn't work. And AI is also hard to fire, especially after it has given us bad advice and then politely said: "I apologize, you are right." Some manager will still have to take the fall. On the other hand, AI also lowers the barrier to entry into the agency business. During the web boom, almost anyone with a few computers could open an "agency." Today's "garage agency," armed with AI, can look like a 30-person agency from day one. That is why expertise becomes important on both sides — the provider must be able to create a relevant solution to the specific problem, and the client must be competent enough to distinguish it from something merely well packaged.

Another question is what marketing teams will look like. If fewer people can do more work, junior positions will probably be among the first affected. The short-term savings are obvious. Except that it was precisely through these positions that future senior specialists were built. If we skip the first rungs of the professional ladder, in ten years we may wonder where to buy ready-made experts. But there is also a reverse effect — a junior can now independently go through almost the entire process much earlier: research, strategic hypothesis, creative routes, copy, visual prototypes, tests.

This changes education as well. Young people are already using AI en masse anyway; the task is less and less to teach them the tool and more and more to give them the context without which they cannot judge its output: business, market, consumer, real problem, goals. Some of the technical skills can be acquired much faster; practice, mistakes and professional judgment — with difficulty. AI can shorten the path to the result; it is not clear whether it can also shorten the path to true expertise.

I see a good illustration in one of the courses I teach at New Bulgarian University — "Goal Setting in Marketing Communication Practices." At the beginning, students work with different brands and, with the help of AI, define the goals, the MarCom strategy and the campaign plan. The first presentations look impressive — well structured, professionally written and convincing. If you look at them one by one, it is hard to say anything is missing. The problem becomes visible when you put them side by side: different brands, categories and competitive situations, and in the end suspiciously similar campaigns and even KPIs — social media, a few influencers, a content plan, reach, engagement, clicks. Different problems, almost the same recipe and almost the same measurement system. By the end of the course, after working on the business context, the consumers, the goals and the strategic logic, the solutions look completely different.

There is one more change that will affect the marketer's role — AI will not be only on our side of the table. Increasingly it will also be on the consumer's side: it will search, compare, filter offers and participate in the choice. Then we will need to understand not only how a person makes a decision, but also what happens when part of the decision journey is delegated to AI. How, for example, do we build preference, brand salience or loyalty if between the brand and the consumer there increasingly stands an algorithm that compares the offers on their behalf?

In such an environment, the value of the marketing specialist will probably shift from execution itself toward correctly formulating the task, professional judgment and decision-making: what is true, what is relevant, what is banal, what differentiates the brand, what has a chance of working, what we can delegate and what is worth doing at all. That is why I would define AI neither simply as a threat nor simply as "the most powerful tool." Rather, it will rearrange the value of skills and make more visible the difference between being able to produce something and understanding why it should be produced in the first place.

And finally — a more distant marketing question. If every company individually makes the perfectly rational decision to cut personnel costs to the maximum and replace as many people as possible with AI, we may find that we have optimized the supply side beautifully. It will be interesting to see what happens to the demand side — and with what salaries the people whose jobs we have meanwhile optimized away with AI will buy the products and services of all these beautifully optimized companies.

P.S. This text, of course, was developed with the help of AI based on my initial concept. After dozens of interactions, arguments, rejected versions and corrections, we finally reached an almost complete consensus — mainly because I had the final word. As for the Bulgarian spelling, however, I take my hat off to it — there I preferred not to argue."

Nikolay Nedelchev (Angel Investor)

"Generative artificial intelligence is both an opportunity and a threat for marketing, but not in a symmetrical way. It is an opportunity when it accelerates the creative process, expands the field of ideas, supports preliminary research, personalizes communication and involves consumers in a process of co-creation. It is a threat when plausibility is taken for truth, speed for quality, personalization for legitimacy, and automation for a substitute for strategy."

Katerina Buyuklieva (Managing Director at Media Club)

"Marketing always changes together with the market, consumers and technology. I see AI neither as a threat to marketing professionals nor as an automatic guarantee of better marketing. For me it is an extremely powerful tool for accessing knowledge, analysis and saving time — and time is one of the most valuable resources in our work.

But just as an encyclopedia does not create the thinking of the person who opens it, AI cannot replace one's own logic, professional training and the ability to make decisions. AI will be strongest in the hands of prepared people. For those who do not think independently, it will not be a salvation."

Greta Koleva — Managing Director, Graffiti BBDO & Proximity Sofia

"Several years after AI entered our work processes, for me the question is no longer whether it will replace marketing specialists, but which marketing specialists will remain valuable in the AI era.

AI is taking over more and more of the activities that require time — analyzing information, generating variants, personalization, optimization and part of operational execution. This frees up marketers' capacity for the more important part of the profession — asking the right questions, understanding the business and the people, making informed choices and taking responsibility for them.

Paradoxically, in my view the greatest threat is not that AI will start thinking for us, but that we will gradually stop thinking for ourselves. Fast and convincing-sounding answers can easily tempt us to accept the ready-made solution without sufficient analysis, verification and our own judgment. That is why I believe critical thinking will be among the most valuable skills of the marketing specialist in the coming years.

AI will undoubtedly be an extremely powerful tool, but the ability to use it will soon be a baseline requirement, not a competitive advantage. The real advantage will lie in the quality of the human judgment behind it — to distinguish information from a true insight, short-term optimization from sustainable effectiveness, and well-generated content from a genuinely good idea.

The more powerful the tool becomes, the more important becomes the person who decides what for, how and why to use it."

Desislava Olovanova (Managing Director at McCann)

"Unlike some of my colleagues, I think AI will change — and is already changing — the professions connected to the communications business, including that of marketing specialists. If you look around you right now (I am speaking of the spring and summer of 2026), you may well notice that there are quite a few marketers whom until recently we knew as prominent professionals in good positions, but who are currently Open to Work. I will not attempt to analyze what led to this wave, and I suspect the causes are complex — post COVID, post euro, wars, supply chains, reduced purchasing power — but the facts are there, and AI is also on the table.

At this stage it plays various and rather schizophrenic roles — a trainee, a highly qualified secretary, yet at the same time it can perform more complex precise activities such as data processing, design, text generation, editing and so on. What I find more interesting is that for some time now AI has been doing quite a good job as a brainstorming buddy — indeed, if you ask it, it positions itself as one. That is already something different, and it is bad news for those who are Open to Work.

But the biggest question is — what comes next. So far so good — it does the job, saves time, takes on the tedious and time-consuming work, doesn't complain, doesn't ask for vacation, is affordable. The question is how much it will "grow up" and who will pay for this entire free lunch. It is no secret that AI currently operates below cost, that it requires enormous resources and that someone will soon have to pay for it. Precedents have already appeared involving million-dollar bills that companies have received when implementing AI tools. Nor would I ignore the first studies on consumer perceptions regarding trust in AI-generated campaigns. Trust there is, as expected, low — which means either that consumers have not yet gotten used to it, or that premium communication will continue the old way.

So the question marks are many, we are in a trial period, and we have yet to adapt our professions (because in marketing there are many) to something that no one can say how it will affect us in 6 months. I would not qualify AI as a threat to our profession — visibly we are all glad it exists — but I would by no means define it as our most powerful tool. Far ahead of it still stand experience, qualification, education, creative potential, critical thinking."

Chavdar Kenarov (Founder & Creative Director, Noble Graphics)

"AI has already changed many processes and will continue to do so. It can be an opportunity or a danger — it depends on the qualities of the one who manages it.

The key question is: who bears the responsibility?

Responsibility will always be borne by a human. And precisely that will be decisive.

Brands will continue to entrust their budgets not to AI, but to those who, thanks to their skills, use its capabilities in the best possible way."

Hariton Dimitrov (Managing Director at MullenLowe Swing)

"At a typical modern wedding* (80–100 guests), between 1,500 and 4,000 photos and videos are taken on the guests' personal phones. Nevertheless, because the stakes are high, the newlyweds rely on a wedding photographer/videographer. They also shoot around 5,000 raw frames, of which they process and deliver between 600 and 1,000. Yet it is precisely these photos that the grandchildren of today's newlyweds will be looking at years from now.

Opening up a given technology (photography in the example above) to everyone invariably leads to unprecedented abundance; the price drops drastically, but so does originality. This in turn creates an opportunity for top professionals to open the scissors upward, creating quality at a significantly higher price.

I cannot comment on AI's impact on the entire marketing mix, but with regard to communications I see exactly what I described in the example above happening: small and micro businesses, which a few years ago could afford only business cards and calendars once a year, have now started creating their own advertising content... weekly. At the same time, medium and large advertisers have started building their own teams and taking ongoing communications into their own hands. The quality of ideas and the average price of execution/production has begun to fall. I expect this to lead to a "spillover" of human resources from advertising agencies toward advertisers, while top agencies shrink to their core nuclei of 3–5–7 people. These are, in any case, the people who have been doing the valuable work all along — now AI will open up the opportunity for them to do even more valuable work, at a higher price. And the most expensive services will be those of the people who can create without AI — by hand." (**\All data in the example are from Gemini***)

Martin Dimitrov (Manager of Nitram)

"Artificial intelligence is developing at such a pace that it is genuinely hard to judge where it will be in 2 or 3 years. Already today it is changing the work of marketing, making it easier: AI can be useful in creating and writing briefs. I believe its development will lead to many marketing specialists doing their work with AI, making less use of advertising agencies and their expertise. A separate question is whether campaigns will not then become equally soulless, untouched by human mind and skill. But that is a question for the future."

Zhanet Naydenova (Co-Founder & Executive Director of the Bulgarian E-commerce Association (BEA))

"AI is not a threat to the marketing profession — in my opinion it is the greatest transformation of the profession since the advent of the Internet.

Over the past two decades, marketing has gone through several major transformations. The first transformation was digitalization, which changed the way we reach consumers. Then came "performance" marketing, which made it possible for almost every marketing investment to be measured, analyzed and optimized in real time. At the same time, brands continued to build trust, recognition and an emotional connection with customers — things we can hardly measure with a single KPI or a single dashboard.

Today we face a new reality. Artificial intelligence already creates content, optimizes campaigns, analyzes data and makes decisions at a speed that until recently seemed impossible. Platforms such as Google, Meta, TikTok and Amazon are automating an ever-larger share of marketing processes and increasingly placing algorithms between a business and its customers.

But no matter how intelligent the algorithms become, one thing remains unchanged — at the center of every marketing strategy still stands the human being, with their needs, emotions and trust.

The future of marketing will not belong solely to performance marketing, solely to brands or solely to platforms. The successful marketers will be those who manage to combine all three — the power of the brand, "performance" marketing and the platforms. Because the brand builds trust, "performance" marketing delivers measurable results, and platforms and AI provide speed and scale.

AI is already taking over an ever-larger share of routine tasks — data analysis, content creation, audience segmentation, campaign optimization, customer communication. This does not mean, however, that marketers will become unnecessary. On the contrary! They will become even more important, because AI can generate thousands of advertising messages in seconds, but it still cannot build trust, understand cultural context or create a genuine connection between a brand and its customers.

That is why I do not think we will see marketers replaced by AI. We will see marketers who do not use AI replaced by those who use it effectively.

In this sense, AI will not be the biggest competitor of marketing specialists. It will be the most powerful tool in the hands of those who know how to combine technology, data and a human understanding of customers.

In conclusion, I will share that I do not believe AI will replace marketing specialists. I believe it will change the criteria for success. We will value task execution less and less, and strategic thinking, creativity and understanding consumers more and more. AI will be an enormous advantage for the marketing leaders who know how to use it. For the rest, it may become a risk. In the end, AI will not win. The people who know how to work with it will."

Georgi Malchev (Managing Partner at XpolraBG)

"The big change is that we will all increasingly focus on the things AI cannot do or does not have. First and most important — we will take on more responsibility. Because AI works with probabilities, and that is precisely what it helps with — everything that can be "vectorized" will increasingly be done by AI. But we humans are humans because we know how to take responsibility and are able to. And in marketing that is key. Because someone has to "get things over the line" and choose a direction, phases, etc.

The second change is that things we did not want to do, or could not do — we will now do. This opens up far more opportunities than it imposes limitations.

And wisdom as "digested experience" — AI will never have that :)"

Elina Ivanova (CEO at Princeps Group)

"I have been running Princeps Group for more than two decades. This year the agency turns 35, and in that time I have witnessed enormous changes in the marketing industry — technological revolutions, crises, new media, new platforms and trends that have reshuffled the rules of the game.

But I can say categorically — nothing has changed the industry as quickly, as drastically and on as many levels at once as artificial intelligence. For me, AI is the greatest accelerator I have seen at the helm of the agency.

I have spent years writing marketing strategies, each of them taking me on average between 20 and 30 working days. Sometimes long nights too, and weekends in which I wrote hundreds of pages. Some of my strategies ran to 300 pages, because I had to do extremely deep research into every aspect, to be highly competent in the specific business, to do the analyses and draw the right conclusions in order to arrive at what would bring a real result for my client. A result I could stand behind.

Today, with the help of LLMs, when I know exactly what I want, know how to do it and know how to write the right prompts, I get the same done within one working day. That is a monstrous saving of time.

There have been cases where I assigned tasks to five, six, seven employees: to research, to analyze, to bring the information back to me so that I could then draw the right conclusions, find the right creative and, combining all of that with my expertise and experience, deliver the right solution. Now a huge part of that work happens without the need for those people. I work all day with several different AI models, on several projects in parallel, and I have trained them so well that they now work with me and for me as if they had been doing it for a decade.

Over the past four years I have not only been studying the various language models in depth, but I now also teach on the subject. It is extremely important to me that young specialists be competitive, because today it is not enough simply to accumulate knowledge and experience. It is extremely important to learn to work with the right tools. It is precisely these that can put a young specialist on an almost equal footing with people who have spent decades in marketing, PR, advertising, digital communications and all the other disciplines that close the full circle of communication and turn it into a real, working tool for the client's business.

The people who currently reject artificial intelligence are, to me, like the people who once rejected the Internet because they were afraid of it. I remember that moment very well: they did not want to go online because they worried about their data and security, about someone breaching them. And today even the grandmothers in the villages scroll their phones with a finger to get the information they need.

It will be the same with artificial intelligence. I believe our children will handle it completely freely from the most tender age, and years from now it will be the most normal thing in the world. Perhaps they will even ask us: "How did you live without it back then? How did you manage?"

So for me AI is by no means a threat to the profession. On the contrary, we must take advantage of it to the absolute maximum. And not only we as marketers. Anyone building a business must learn to work with such models, because this is no longer a matter of curiosity about new technologies. It is a matter of competitiveness."

Ivan Ivanchev (Manager at EasyAds.bg)

"The role of AI in marketing is to replace the regular, repetitive, monotonous and even boring processes. Our profession is full of them. For example — compiling and sending activity reports, daily process tracking, all kinds of small fixes to images and copy.

These are often also the activities that put young people off the profession. Supposedly marketing requires creativity or, conversely, logical thinking — and in the end you spend all day ticking off monotonous tasks and filling in Excel.

That is why, with the arrival of AI, this profession will finally return to its essence and will again depend on the human — on the communication between client and contractor, on attention to detail and on the ability to think and create.

I will give an example from our own work — we create interactive HTML5 creatives tailored to each specific campaign and each individual brand. They are made by hand, slowly, with planning, discussion and care. That is precisely where AI cannot help. There is no tool that can replace you.

But it was important for us to automate several other manual activities so that we would have more time left for thinking and creativity."

Hristo Hristov (Managing Director at Digital Vision)

"The answer to the question is both at once, depending on the specialist's mindset. The real dividing line runs not between "human versus AI" but between a specialist who knows how to use it and one who does not. Precisely where AI stops is where the human advantage begins — strategic thinking, understanding of brand identity, cultural context, humor and fine emotional nuance remain difficult for a machine to reproduce. That is exactly why the role of the marketing specialist is transforming into an orchestrator of processes — someone who sets the goals and the messages and builds complete marketing systems instead of single campaigns.

And here comes the role of the digital agency partner, which is turning from useful into priceless. Few companies can build an internal team of AI orchestrators, strategists and technology experts on their own — and digital agencies offer precisely this complex mix of competencies "under one roof." Combined with the accumulated experience of working with dozens of clients and industries, and access to new AI tools and practices long before they become the market standard, they become the strategic backbone of every marketing team.

AI is an accelerator. The winning position in the coming years belongs to specialists who think strategically, understand the business beyond purely marketing metrics and use AI as a multiplier of results — not merely as a tool for executing routine tasks."

Adrian Todorov (Director Sales, Business Development & Marketing at ARS Bulgaria)

"My view on the subject is that AI will be neither simply a threat nor simply a tool — its effect will depend on the sector, on the maturity and on the professionalism of the marketing leader and the team.

For some businesses AI will be a generator — it will create new opportunities, new ways of reaching customers and even new business models.

For others it will be a catalyst — it will accelerate and make processes far more efficient, and will catalyze by cleaning out the inefficient ones.

Over the next few years the role of the marketing professional will transform from execution toward strategy, interpretation and decision-making.

AI will take over more and more of the operational work, but it will not replace the understanding of the customer, the business context, creativity and the ability to build trust.

We are already about to see brands that deliberately position certain products, services or experiences as created with minimal or no use of AI.

And even in the long term I see a very interesting tendency — I actually expect a reverse trend: when AI becomes ubiquitous, human presence may turn into a competitive advantage, and the very act of distancing from AI, or highlighting the human approach, may become part of a brand's positioning. That is, there will be brands that deliberately communicate that certain products, services or experiences are "human-made," "AI-free" or made with minimal use of AI. Then this will not be a technological shortcoming but a differentiating value for certain target audiences.

And here I would insert a bit of in-house "factory" humor: that much depends on what natural intelligence stands behind the artificial intelligence. Because AI can generate analyses and content, but the human must know which idea makes sense, what to do with it and above all — why, how and when to do it. In other words, the classic framework of the 4 Ps of the marketing mix (Product, Price, Place, Promotion) I would interpret in a more modern context, namely the theory of the 5 Ws — Who, How, Where, What and How Much... : )

That is why I do not think AI will replace marketing specialists. It will certainly change part of the way they work.

The strongest marketing leaders will be those who know how to combine artificial with natural intelligence — and to turn that combination into a real competitive advantage with high added value."

Anka Kostova (Director Marketing, Advertising and Communication at iBank)

"For me the question is not whether AI is a threat to the marketing profession, but how we will change the way we work with it. Because the change is already happening — and much faster than we probably expected. Things that until recently took us hours or days can now happen in minutes. We can much more quickly seek out a different point of view, or simply get past that moment familiar to everyone in our profession — the blank page and the instant when you wonder where to begin.

But I also see the other side — AI can give you a wonderful text that doesn't sound like you at all. It can offer you a beautiful visual that has nothing to do with your brand. It can give you ten ideas and not one of them the right one. And that is exactly why I do not think the technology makes the marketing specialist less necessary. On the contrary.

My professional path has involved both PR and communications and marketing, and honestly, I hardly see a boundary between them anymore. In both professions we are ultimately trying to understand people. What moves them? What will make them stop and pay attention to us? Why do they believe in and prefer one brand and not another? That cannot always be read in the data.

AI gives us an enormous advantage — speed. Things that used to take us hours or days can now happen in minutes. I would not give that up. But a fast answer does not necessarily mean the right answer. And a lot of content can remain just content — well written, good-looking, but hollow, if there is no idea, meaning and genuine message behind it.

There are moments when you see all the numbers, analyses and arguments in front of you and yet something tells you: "No, this is not going to work." Or the opposite — you have an idea you can hardly defend with ten charts, but you simply feel it is the right one. That comes with experience, with mistakes, with knowing people and the business. We call it professional intuition, but behind it actually stand years of work. And for now I would not trade it for any algorithm.

That is why I think AI will change our profession, but in a good direction. I hope it takes the boring part away from us. That it does more of the mechanical work and leaves us more time to think, to invent, to argue about ideas, to make decisions.

Because the easier it becomes to produce content, the harder it will be to create something that someone actually remembers.

And perhaps that will be the big change in the coming years. It will not matter so much who can produce more and faster. What will matter more is who has something to say.

AI can give us very good answers. But it is still we who must know what we want to ask."

Petar Lozanov (Co-founder and CEO at Battlepass Studio)

"For me, AI has already changed the marketing reality by putting a "weapon" in the hands of every non-marketer with which they can comfortably stand up to the big marketing teams and create content, creatives, videos, and even entire campaigns at a sufficiently high level.

This will inevitably lead to:

1. A drop in prices, or even the disappearance, of a large share of the services that AI manages to replace at 85+ percent

2. Junior positions and internships becoming very hard to find

3. The creation of AI marketing agencies that do not sell team hours but build AI agents/teams for a specific brand or business, to feed it with ideas and content and to take over activities that are easy to automate.

The marketing specialist will not become unnecessary, but they will have to be a generalist to a much greater degree — someone who understands the big picture and can easily create finished products and solutions with the help of AI."

Dimitrina Naydenska (Marketing Manager at Xiaomi Technology)

"Speaking of AI through the lens of a marketing specialist, I believe the leading role will be played by process optimization, and the established model of work will change, but the human factor will not be entirely replaced. The AI focus has been a heavily exploited topic in recent years, and people often speak of a "threat," but also of an "opportunity" for businesses. It depends on a company's leadership how it will be perceived and implemented down the chain. I believe it is a matter of adaptability amid the dynamics of today's challenges, and also of human reason — that we cannot, at least for now, rely blindly on artificial intelligence.

Yes, for some professions the challenges of AI adoption are greater, and dealing with them is not a unilateral decision. Consumer perceptions and attitudes at present show us that AI cannot be fully relied upon for quick and budget solutions. Consumers have a sense of realism and an emotional connection that cannot be fully achieved with AI-generated visuals. We face an interesting dynamic, and whatever our field, I believe we must adapt and think above all from the standpoint of the human factor, rather than reaching for easy solutions."

Stamen Kostov (Group Marketing Director at Elprom Group)

"The very first AI wave changed the marketing sphere abruptly. The playing field became both more interesting and more chaotic. Not only marketing specialists, but everyone with access to artificial intelligence and a dose of curiosity began experimenting with the new "smart" acquisition — generating content and multimedia, doing research, even simply conversing and asking for advice. Thus we all became specialists in everything, because we started receiving fast, professional-looking solutions to every single task. But do we have the skills to verify these solutions served up by artificial intelligence? Let us not forget that we bear a responsibility to our audience to present truthful content with value — regardless of whether that audience is our LinkedIn followers or an internal meeting with colleagues.

The fear that AI is a threat to many professions, above all that of the marketing specialist, has existed since day one and has not left us yet. I believe that, like any other tool, artificial intelligence is yet another strong card in the hand of the capable, experienced and, above all, critically thinking person who can use it correctly. If I had to guess, in the next few years we may witness an interesting evolution of the AI field in various respects. The true specialists with experience will continue to improve themselves and increase their value with the help of artificial intelligence. The young, fledgling specialists without marketing experience are betting on all kinds of AI platforms, learning them at a rapid pace, and it will be interesting to see their development after 1–2 years of "knocking about" in the industry — whether they will swim or struggle, because they have not walked the beaten paths and have not developed their critical thinking. We can see that our audience is already growing tired of AI-generated content and is again seeking the original and the meaningful. We must not forget that.

I believe the best initial direction is developing team skills and processes with the implementation of artificial intelligence, as the applications can now be almost endless. It would be interesting if, in time, political wars emerged aimed at restricting the popular AI platforms in certain countries and businesses, and if subscription prices increased many times over. To me this is an entirely realistic scenario — part of it has already become reality. You teach the whole world to use AI and all its applications, and then you raise the price of using it. Many specialists could thus be forced to look for an alternative or to return to the fundamentals of marketing. Again we arrive at one and the same conclusion: to improve ourselves together with AI, to apply critical thinking and to predict future trends correctly — because now we have the right tools for it."

Ivaylo Tonchev (Marketing Director at Framar.bg)

"If I turn out to be right, it will be neither the one nor the other. The decisions of a marketing specialist ought to contain reason, skill, tact, morality, vision and a tiny bit of willingness to flirt with what is popularly called "luck." And don't forget — responsibility. Can you expect those from AI?

AI makes things much easier, but if a colleague and I use the same solution, pay the same fee and ask the same questions, what then will be our "competitive advantage"?

At the moment this is a leading approach; there are companies that build their entire strategy on AI — an AI product, campaign, execution, communication; everything is generated and designed for you to buy it. Products are generated that are made solely in order to be sold. But if you have the right formula and string of questions, why should you buy it when you could also produce it and sell it to others?

Everything is so temptingly cheap and easy that everyone wants to be a creator — but that way no consumers are left. Millions of invented products and strategies, mountains of industrial junk and destroyed resources, the fruit of "it was easy and I had the money to do it."

No, it will not be the most powerful tool if you want to grow a business with long-term goals. I do not know whether it will be a threat to anyone's profession, whichever it may be. I do not regard a profession as a life sentence, and yes, people can and must adapt. No one can replace the labor of the tile-layer — we all learned that the hard way. It turned out that programmers are not eternal. Nor were the menders of runs in women's stockings, or the piano tuners — such professions existed years ago too. But if we want to survive and live long, we must adapt.

There is one more insidious aspect — AI makes everything too easy, which turns us into office loafers, helpless outside the safe environment in which we control everything with two buttons. There is no need to think, either. The next generations may not know at all what it means to "make a decision" if behind every decision stands AI.

For now — AI makes us faster and more efficient, but also lonely, unsure of ourselves, asocial, sometimes slightly cynical, and with the illusory feeling that we can do anything. What will happen tomorrow, I wonder?"

Silvia Andreeva (Marketing Director at Syscom Engineering)

"I am tempted to repeat the mantra, now turned cliché, that AI will not replace marketing specialists, but those who use AI will. I will not do it. Not because it is untrue, but because it no longer distinguishes anyone. Everyone in marketing uses AI. Two years ago that was an advantage; today it is a baseline requirement.

That is why, in my view, the question "threat or tool" is wrongly posed. Over the next 2–3 years AI will be both, but not for the same roles. It is a threat to roles built around purely executional processes — writing copy, adapting content, research, reporting. It is a tool for those whose value lies in judgment, not in execution. And the difference will not be in whether you use AI, but at what level.

I strongly believe in the human-in-the-loop approach when we talk about AI, and in my view the quality of the person behind the tool is becoming ever more important. Marketing is fertile ground for testing AI's capabilities, and it is already clear that it cannot replace strategic thinking, creativity, understanding the client's problems and finding the most suitable solution for them. If we use AI as a substitute for Google, or to think instead of us, we will produce ever more AI slop — even LinkedIn and Substack now make it possible for such content to be recognized and flagged.

The change that I think is underestimated is this: the more AI floods the digital channels with content, the more expensive human trust becomes. It is no longer enough to have search-optimized content to enter the customer's field of vision. The market increasingly believes people, not ads. Offline events, communities and recommendations have an ever-greater influence on customers' decisions. The paradox is that AI's strongest effect on marketing may turn out to be the rising price of everything AI cannot produce.

At the same time, AI provides something that until recently was the privilege only of companies with large teams and budgets: the ability to test different approaches to the market quickly and cheaply, and to analyze data. A team of one or two marketing specialists working at the level of AI-native processes, agents, prototyping and data structuring — rather than merely chatting with the models — today handles a volume that used to require 5–6 people. To give an example — we have an agent that monitors the market environment every week and prepares an overview for the team with specific recommendations, owners and deadlines. The most interesting thing about it, however, is not the automation but the rule: the assistant recommends, the team decides, and the team's decision sits in a protected part of the file that the agent has no right to touch. At the heart of this architecture is precisely the human-in-the-loop concept.

And from here comes the real threat, which we talk about far too little — it is precisely the tasks through which people entered the profession that are disappearing. If the entry level disappears, the next generation of marketing specialists will have nowhere to accumulate the judgment we will later demand of them. That is a problem of the industry, not of AI. The solution lies in the way we build our teams — and it has yet to be found.

AI will be the most powerful tool marketing has ever had. But only in the hands of a person who has something to say even without it."

Violeta Tsonkova (Marketing and Communications Director at Bulgaria Mall & Bulgaria Towers)

"AI will not replace marketing specialists, and I would in no way define it as a threat. On the contrary — right now it is one of our most faithful companions. And over the next 2–3 years, artificial intelligence applications will probably become one of the most powerful tools in the hands of good marketing teams.

Already today, AI saves significant time in research, information analysis, developing first drafts of content, structuring ideas and a range of operational tasks. Its true value, however, is not simply in doing the same things faster, but in freeing up time for the more important part of marketing — strategy, creativity and understanding the consumer.

In my view, this is precisely where the role of the marketing specialist will change. Instead of a large part of the day passing in routine and technical tasks, teams will have more time to develop their creative approach, to think up more interesting campaigns, to polish them in detail and to make them more intuitive and convenient for the consumer. That is a far more meaningful use of human expertise.

AI tools, however, require careful management. They must be properly configured for the specific business, its goals, audiences, brand identity and manner of communication. Every result must be checked, edited and judged by a person who understands the context and can assess whether the proposal actually works.

The advantage will not lie in who uses AI, because everyone does, but in who knows what to ask of AI, how to evaluate the result and how to turn it into a better solution for the business and for the consumer. At the foundation there always remain the business goals. If a technology, campaign or idea does not contribute to them, using it becomes an end in itself."

Anita Bedin (Head of Product Management and Marketing, Kärcher)

"I do not believe AI is a threat to the marketing profession. Rather, it will be the most powerful tool in the hands of the marketing leaders who know how to use it strategically.

I expect that over the next two to three years artificial intelligence will substantially change the way we work. It will support data analysis, the extraction of customer insights, audience segmentation and micro-targeting, campaign optimization, as well as the preparation and structuring of content, files and documents. Today we are no longer discussing whether to use AI, but how to use it effectively in order to make faster, better-informed and better business decisions.

I am convinced that a significant share of operational and administrative tasks, as well as activities traditionally performed by junior specialists, will gradually be automated. This, however, will not diminish the role of the marketing specialist — it will transform it.

The future of the profession will be increasingly strategic. The most valuable people will be those who can combine AI's technological capabilities with business thinking, critical analysis and a good understanding of consumer behavior. Alongside technical competencies, skills such as communication, negotiation, people and project management, adaptability and the ability to make decisions in a dynamic environment will gain ever-greater importance.

AI can process enormous volumes of information in seconds, but it cannot replace human judgment, strategic thinking, emotional intelligence and the building of trust — qualities that lie at the foundation of successful marketing.

That is why I believe the successful marketing leaders will not be those who simply use AI, but those who can combine its capabilities with their professional experience, strategic vision and strong leadership and communication skills."

Kameliya Ilarionova (Head of Marketing Department at ProCredit Bank)

"Marketing leaders must possess strategic thinking, a capacity for long-term planning, critical thinking, experience, decisiveness and a desire for continuous learning. These are qualities that artificial intelligence cannot replace. And in my view it is precisely they that remain the most powerful tool in the hands of the true professional and leader.

The strength of the marketing leader lies not in AI itself, but in the skill of knowing when, where and how to apply it.

Ultimately, we all operate in an environment of constant change and work with the needs, emotions and reactions of an audience made up of real people. That is why the marketing leader must constantly keep a finger on the pulse of the environment, must be able to anticipate, recognize and understand the changes in it and respond to them appropriately.

AI reflects and analyzes the results of situations that have already passed. The role of the marketing leader is to understand what the lessons from them are, what gave rise to them and, using their critical thinking, to make the most appropriate decision for the future.

If a marketing leader relies entirely or mostly on AI, they deprive themselves of the opportunity to learn through real experience, to accumulate deep practical knowledge from work "in the field." Nothing can replace the ability to "step into the consumers' shoes" and to live through the entire customer journey together with them. It is precisely this approach that builds strong marketing leaders and highly valued specialists.

Artificial intelligence will undoubtedly change the marketing profession. The most affected will be the more operational roles and the activities based on routine and repetitive tasks. Some of these professions will probably disappear or be substantially transformed — people will have to develop the skills to supervise and manage the specific activities rather than perform them.

On the other hand, if all routine tasks come to be performed by artificial intelligence, this will keep young specialists from understanding the logic behind the processes and the sequence of their structure. And that will make a calm, gradual entry into the profession more difficult, since until now it was the natural door, the step through which we begin to learn.

AI would also be a threat in cases where the role of marketing is perceived merely as an operating cost for the company, rather than as an investment and a source of added value for building a sustainable brand and a long-term relationship with the audience. In organizations that understand the strategic role of marketing, artificial intelligence will not replace the marketing leader, because their qualities remain a human capability."

Yuliyana Borisova (Marketing Director at TITAN Zlatna Panega)

"I do not think AI will replace the marketing profession. But I am convinced that the marketing professionals who know how to work with AI will have a serious advantage over those who do not.

Not only in marketing but in every profession, AI is already changing the way we work. Tasks that used to take hours of research, analysis or structuring of ideas now happen much faster with the help of artificial intelligence. This frees up time for what, in my view, has always been the most valuable part of marketing — strategic thinking, understanding the customer, making decisions, creating ideas with real impact.

And here the basic rule remains the same: the quality of the answer depends on the quality of the question. To use AI effectively, you must know what you want to achieve and formulate the right problem. And the ability to formulate the right problem and a clear message has always been at the heart of good marketing. That is why I believe that with the advance of AI, strategic thinking will become an even more valuable asset in our profession.

My expectation is that over the next 2–3 years AI will build upon the role of the marketing professional rather than endanger it. The real value will lie not in the technology itself, but in a person's ability to ask the right questions, provide context and judge what makes sense for the business and for people.

I see the future as a partnership between humans and AI. AI brings speed, scale and access to an enormous amount of information. The human brings context, intuition, critical thinking and empathy. The best results come when the two work together. Then AI is not a threat but an amplifier of human potential.

Ultimately, marketing has always been a profession about understanding people — their needs, motivations and choices. I believe that precisely this will remain the most human and valuable part of our work, no matter how far the technologies advance."

Neli Kasabova (Marketing Manager at Schwarz Digits)

"AI is already an integral part of the working day, but it still seems to me far from fully replacing marketing specialists — rather, it is transforming our role. With its capabilities for automating and taking over operational and routine tasks, AI significantly increases productivity and efficiency and frees up resources for strategic management. In this sense the foundation remains unchanged — the human sets the goals, defines the framework and manages the artificial intelligence, not the other way around — and in the next few years I see it as a powerful tool for achieving competitive advantage, not as a threat to the profession."

Konstantin Bachvarov (Marketing Expert)

"I do not believe AI is a threat to the profession of the marketing specialist. Rather, it is a threat to the way we have grown accustomed to practicing it.

Over the next 2–3 years, artificial intelligence will take over a large part of the routine and time-consuming work — data processing and analysis, research, initial concepts, content variants, optimization and the automation of numerous processes. This will not make the good marketing specialist redundant. On the contrary — it will give them more time for what a human is actually needed for: strategy, ideas, understanding consumer behavior, brand positioning and decision-making.

For me, AI is a tool for multiplying human capacity. It makes it possible to complete in hours work that used to take days, to analyze far more options and to make decisions based on considerably more information.

But AI has no marketing intuition of its own, no life experience and no responsibility for the final result. The quality of what we get from it depends to a great extent on the quality of the person who manages it. That is why I do not expect AI to replace marketing specialists. It is more likely that the marketing specialists who know how to work with AI will gradually displace those who do not.

In this sense, in the coming years the competitive advantage will not be access to AI itself — practically everyone will have that. The advantage will be the ability to use it correctly, without delegating our own thinking to it."

Anna Tsenova (Marketing Manager at Updata One)

"Honestly, the hardest part of this question for me is the "in 2–3 years" part. A year ago at this time I had no idea that today I would have access to some of the technologies I use daily. And if someone had told me three years ago that I would be able to build applications on my own, automate entire marketing processes or generate video in this way, it would probably have sounded like science fiction.

That is why I would not try to predict exactly what the marketing specialist's role will look like in 2029. What I am far more confident about is that it will keep changing, and that the boundaries between the individual specializations will become ever more blurred.

It is no longer so important whether you are a "content person," a "performance person" or an "analytics person." AI allows us to enter territories for which we used to depend entirely on other specialists. This does not mean expertise is disappearing. It means one person can connect a far larger part of the process and get from idea to actual execution much faster.

And that is why I do not think the biggest question is whether AI is a threat or a tool. The bigger risk is how quickly we ourselves can adapt to the opportunities it creates.

Because AI can save an enormous amount of time, but for me at least the result is not less work. Quite the opposite. The more constraints fall away, the more things I see that could be done. The bar keeps rising.

So if I nevertheless had to make one forecast for the next 2–3 years, I would not focus on a specific technology or profession. The emphasis will rather be on the qualities that will matter: curiosity, critical thinking, the ability to connect different fields and, above all, the readiness to constantly change the way you work."

Nino Berezhani (Marketing Manager @ Balkan Gaming and Entertainment Expo)

"In my view, AI will not replace the marketing specialist, but it will change what in their work carries the greatest value. Routine tasks such as content generation, data analysis, segmentation and testing will increasingly be taken over by AI, because it does them significantly faster. The specialist's role, however, will become even more strategic. What is key now is not simply to use AI, but what questions you ask it, how you read the results and what business decision you make.

In the gambling industry, where I work, this is critical. AI cannot replace human judgment when it comes to brand, ethics, responsible marketing and regulation. That is why I see AI not as a threat but as one of the most powerful tools in the hands of marketing leaders."

Reni Ananieva (Marketing Manager)

"AI is transforming marketing from within, making it faster and more accessible.

What is it now? Seen from the business side, the servicing marketing and advertising agencies used to have time for budgeting, meetings, plans and presentations. Now that time is used for rapid structuring of the work, generating ideas and quickly changing the plan. On the other hand, part of the business world prefers to develop in-house units. Many entrepreneurs prefer to invest in their own understanding of marketing and take things into their own hands, rather than spend months educating agencies about the goals they have set.

What will it be? A restructuring of marketing roles and of the way of working lies ahead. Fewer people, but more multifunctional ones. With the help of AI tools, a single person can offer a broad portfolio of services and marketing capabilities across different platforms. Content creation is much faster, and many operations are automated. The questions of copyright and the authenticity of content remain. Filtering ideas, creating concepts and communicating with the client will remain reserved human territory. Strategy too; execution — automation and efficiency of processes.

If I had to conclude: the future belongs to the strategic leaders in marketing who use a portfolio of AI tools to ease the process of creation and realization."

Marta Neshova (Communications and Marketing Advisor)

"For me the answer is unequivocal: AI is already the most powerful tool in the hands of true marketing and communications experts.

AI tools are already freeing up an enormous operational resource, which we can invest where marketing actually creates value for the business — in strategy, market positioning, understanding consumer needs and experience, and in creativity that shows a real knowledge of people, their interests and their motivation.

That is why I do not think AI will render the marketing specialist's role meaningless. On the contrary, it will return it to its essence. What AI will gradually devalue are the purely technical and executional functions, especially in digital marketing, which in recent years were often mistakenly equated with marketing expertise. The ability to operate a platform, set up a campaign or produce a certain type of content is no longer a sufficient competitive advantage in itself.

Will AI be a threat? Yes, but not so much to the profession as to a certain idea of it. AI will very clearly separate the marketing experts from the marketing "technicians." The more accessible execution becomes, the more valuable will be the ability to ask the right question, to understand the business and the consumer, to make a strategic choice and to bear responsibility for the result."