The dawn of AI-to-AI marketing 

Imagine waking up to discover that your profession has an expiration date—not someday, not eventually, but exactly nine years from now. For marketing professionals in developed economies, this is no longer speculation. Scholars such as Giuseppe Stigliano and Philip Kotler warn that human-centric marketing, once the beating heart of the industry, is counting down to its end. Within the next decade, artificial intelligence could take full control, ushering in a marketplace where machines negotiate, make decisions, and transact with one another.

Beneath the surface of our daily clicks and scrolls, an invisible economy has begun to thrive. Algorithms no longer merely assist human marketers. They are the marketers and, increasingly, the customers. Your refrigerator orders groceries before you notice you’re out of milk. Your car schedules its own maintenance. Your home system upgrades itself overnight. This is the dawn of AI-to-AI marketing, a world where intelligent systems make buying decisions without human involvement. What once felt like science fiction has become a quiet revolution reshaping commerce in real time.

Marketing’s gradual obsolescence unfolded through three phases. The first introduced data-driven marketing, empowering humans to use algorithms for insight and optimization. The second ceded control to automation as machines mastered content creation, logistics, and dynamic pricing. In the current phase, artificial intelligence surpasses human capability entirely analyzing billions of data points, predicting emotions, and crafting persuasive campaigns that outperform anything human intuition can conceive. The student has surpassed the teacher, and the shift is accelerating.

For emerging economies like the Philippines, this transformation poses both risk and opportunity. As we strengthen digital infrastructure and modernize education, we may be preparing a workforce for an industry that no longer exists in its traditional form. Studies reveal that companies adopting AI marketing models achieve up to 65 percent higher efficiency and 28 percent lower operational costs. The pressure for local firms to automate will be immense. Yet such progress raises an unsettling question: what happens to marketing graduates, BPO professionals, and creative workers when human judgment is no longer the competitive edge?

Efficiency, however, is not synonymous with meaning. Marketing has always been more than the science of selling; it is the art of storytelling, of connecting people to products through emotion and culture. Can algorithms grasp the warmth of a Filipino Christmas campaign or the pride behind a first major purchase? Can data replicate the joy, humor, and subtlety that define the Filipino consumer experience? When the human touch disappears, marketing risks becoming mechanical—efficient, personalized, and profoundly soulless.

This dilemma extends beyond marketing. Across professions—law, medicine, journalism, finance—machines are outperforming humans in tasks once deemed judgment-based. The optimistic refrain that “humans will focus on higher-order creativity” grows tenuous as AI begins composing songs, generating art, and crafting strategic plans. What remains uniquely human when creativity itself is automated?

Yet the countdown need not end in obsolescence. Businesses must discern where human insight still adds irreplaceable value and design hybrid systems that merge machine precision with human empathy. Educators must reimagine curricula to teach adaptability, ethics, and cultural intelligence—skills machines cannot replicate. Policymakers must craft safeguards that ensure fairness, transparency, and social protection amid technological disruption. And individuals must strengthen capacities that define our humanity: empathy, imagination, and moral reasoning.

Nine years, perhaps more, perhaps less. The question is not whether artificial intelligence will transform marketing; it already has. The real question is whether we will let that transformation erase what makes our work meaningful. Will we build an economy optimized for efficiency alone, or one that preserves human creativity and conscience at its core?

The data tells us what’s possible. Only we can decide what’s desirable. The machines may be getting smarter, but they cannot answer the question that matters most: What kind of world do we want to live in?

The countdown continues, but so does our chance to choose.