What 13,000 marketing job ads told us about AI in Australian hiring

Back in January, I started noticing the AI-jobs conversation everywhere — particularly the version about what it was supposedly doing to early-career roles. Junior marketers getting nervous. LinkedIn full of warnings. Yet every business I spoke with said AI was already part of how they worked.

So which was it: AI everywhere, or AI nowhere? We went and looked.

Today My2Cents — the marketing podcast and research project Denise Rainey and I run — published the first of a four-part series on AI in Australian marketing hiring. Here’s what 13,000 Australian marketing job ads told us, and what it means for anyone hiring marketers right now.

A quick refresh on My2Cents

Last year we ran it as a guest-first podcast — interesting people, an episode at a time. This year we’ve flipped it. Topic-first, data-led. Pick the questions the industry isn’t measuring, build the dataset, publish in a series. The first series — out now — is AI in Australian marketing hiring.

We pulled roughly 13,000 publicly available Australian marketing job ads from January to April this year, and cross-referenced what employers say about AI with what they’re actually asking candidates to bring.

Four things jumped out.

The Say/Do Gap

Every man and his dog is saying they’re using AI. 91% of Australian marketing businesses, in fact (BizCover). 75% of leaders say they wouldn’t hire without AI skills (Microsoft / LinkedIn).

Yet just 3.5% of those 13,000 job ads ask for it.

The gap between what we’re saying and what we’re putting on the JD is enormous. The kicker… we’re already screening candidates with AI. We’re just not asking them to bring any.

Performative AI

Of the small slice that did mention AI, most were just using it as a buzzword. “AI-powered company” boilerplate slapped onto an otherwise traditional role. The same sentence appearing word-for-word across unrelated jobs at the same employer.

So what’s going on? Are we just being lazy in our hiring? Or are we calling BS on where businesses actually are with AI?

We don’t know yet. But it’s a healthy debate to have.

A small number doing genuinely transformative work

A handful of Australian businesses describe themselves AND hire like AI is genuinely reshaping their marketing function. They’re worth studying.

If you’re trying to build AI-fluent marketing capability into your business, those examples are basically your funnel — what good actually looks like.

The shadow AI tail — and the university gap

A lot of AI use is happening behind closed doors. On personal phones. In personal ChatGPT accounts. Sometimes with company data in the prompt.

1 in 4 Australian employees use AI without telling their manager. Only 30% of organisations have an AI policy at all.

And it tracks all the way back to where the next generation gets trained — 84% of Australian university marketing curricula contain zero AI content. Bond and UQ are the standout exceptions. Most aren’t close.

What this means for marketing leaders

If you’re hiring marketers, the easiest fix is the smallest one: write AI into the JD. Not boilerplate. Concrete tools, concrete tasks. The candidates who can do this work already exist — your competitors are just doing a better job of finding them.

If you’re running a marketing function, your shadow-AI usage is a governance risk dressed up as productivity. Build a usable policy. Not legal’s “don’t” — a real “do this, in these tools, with this oversight” — before the breach, not after.

What’s next

This is part one of four. Over the next few weeks we’ll cover:

  • 91% of Australian marketing businesses say they use AI (BizCover, 2025), and 75% of leaders say they wouldn’t hire someone without AI skills (Microsoft / LinkedIn Work Trend Index, 2024). But just 3.5% of around 13,000 Australian marketing job ads posted between January and April 2026 actually ask for AI skills. We’re calling that gap the “Say/Do Gap” — what we say we do with AI versus what employers put on the JD.

  • Performative AI is when an employer markets itself as AI-driven in the job description, but the actual role doesn’t need, require, or use AI. Common patterns: “AI-powered company” boilerplate slapped onto otherwise traditional roles, the same AI sentence appearing word-for-word across unrelated jobs at the same employer, and references to job-board matching algorithms as evidence the role is “AI-enabled”. You can browse a live breakdown of where Australian marketing job ads sit on the capability scale at https://jobs.my2cents.com.au — and keep an eye out for part 2 of this series, where we go deeper on what genuine AI-fluent hiring looks like.

  • At the Capable level (a good entry-point), the role lists one or two concrete AI tools or tasks the marketer is expected to use day-to-day. At higher levels, the JD explicitly redesigns workflows around AI — building prompt libraries, integrating tools across the marketing stack, lifting team throughput. The key difference from performative AI is that the AI mention sits in the role requirements, not the company boilerplate. For live examples across all four levels, see https://jobs.my2cents.com.au.

  • Three things. One: drop the “AI-powered company” boilerplate from the company description if the actual role doesn’t use AI — it’s filtering out the wrong people. Two: name specific tools and tasks you expect the marketer to use (e.g. “build prompt libraries for content production”, “integrate Claude or ChatGPT into our editorial workflow”, “use AI for SEO and competitor analysis”). Three: include AI in the screening criteria, not just the JD — if it’s not screen-able, candidates won’t bother including it on their CV.

  • Be specific. Not “AI-savvy” or “passionate about AI” — name the exact tools, tasks, and outcomes you’ve worked on. From the 13,000 Australian marketing job ads we analysed, the language top employers are starting to use looks like: “built a prompt library to scale content production across X campaigns”, “integrated Claude or ChatGPT into our editorial workflow, lifting throughput by Y%”, or “use AI for SEO competitor analysis and topic clustering”. Write your CV the way the strongest job ads are written — concrete tools, concrete tasks, concrete outcomes. You can see live examples of the language across all four capability levels at https://jobs.my2cents.com.au, and we’ll go deeper on this in part 2 of the series.

  • Shadow AI is employees using AI tools their employer hasn’t sanctioned, often on personal accounts, sometimes with company or client data in the prompt. In Australia, 1 in 4 employees use AI without telling their manager (AHRI, December 2025), 1 in 3 professionals upload sensitive data to AI without oversight (Josys, September 2025), and only 30% of organisations have a workplace AI policy at all (KPMG, 2025). For marketing teams specifically, this means client data is sitting in someone’s personal ChatGPT account — a governance and confidentiality risk dressed up as productivity.

  • Start with the principle, not the policy: “do this, in these tools, with this oversight” beats legal’s “don’t”. Bans don’t work — they push usage further underground. To go deeper, the Marketing AI Institute (https://www.marketingaiinstitute.com) runs free courses and a content series specifically on AI fluency and policy for marketing functions. We’re members at Nugget Digital, and recommend it as the fastest way to build both your team’s AI fluency and a usable policy that holds up.

  • Mostly not. A March 2026 My2Cents analysis of 629 marketing subjects across 32 Australian universities found 84% contain no AI content at all. Bond University (79% of marketing subjects referencing AI) and the University of Queensland (61%) are the standout exceptions. RMIT recently added two AI-relevant units — AI in Marketing, and Enterprise AI and Business Analytics — to its Bachelor of Commerce. The vocational sector is moving faster: in April 2026 the Australian and NSW Governments committed $11 million to turn TAFE NSW Meadowbank into a national Digital TAFE Centre of Excellence with AI threaded through the curriculum.

Marketing StrategyChris Jowseymy2cents, Ai in Marketing