By Jacqueline Burns  

Artificial intelligence has dramatically lowered the cost of producing content. It has not lowered the importance of judgement, emotional intelligence, strategic thinking, editorial discipline or numerous other soft skills particular to humans.

Today, organisations can generate articles, imagery, video, summaries and commentary in minutes using sophisticated AI tools. As a result, content production is rapidly becoming commoditised. However, commoditised content is not necessarily valuable.

As our digital environment becomes saturated with AI-generated material – much of it ‘content pollution’ – the competitive advantage is shifting away from volume and towards credibility, discernment and strategic relevance.

The following selected content and content-adjacent roles show why human soft skills remain critical across modern marketing and communications functions.

Content strategist

A content strategist defines the organisation’s content direction, priorities and strategic messaging framework. The role’s focus is ensuring the organisation creates the right content for the right audience, through the right channels, at the right time and for the right commercial reasons. 

Their responsibilities may include:

• audience and stakeholder analysis
• buyer persona development
• customer journey mapping
• messaging frameworks
• editorial planning, and
• articulating meaningful points of differentiation.

Human capabilities

• Strategic thinking: aligning content with commercial, brand, audience and organisational objectives while identifying where the organisation can create genuine differentiation. 
• Business acumen: understanding how content contributes to commercial outcomes, client acquisition, stakeholder trust and organisational performance.
• Analytical thinking: interpreting audience behaviour, market trends, content performance and emerging opportunities. 
• Editorial judgement: determining what content should be created, why it matters, who it serves and whether it contributes meaningful value within a saturated digital environment.

Managing editor

Most people associate editors with proofreading for spelling and grammar mistakes. But a managing editor does far more than correct copy. A managing editor is responsible for maintaining editorial quality, consistency, governance and credibility across an organisation’s content ecosystem. This includes ensuring content:

• reflects the organisation’s brand, positioning and standards
• aligns with the organisation’s style guide
• satisfies its risk profile
• complies with legal and policy requirements, and
• protects confidentiality.

They also play a critical role in fact-checking, source validation, editorial governance and identifying misinformation, inaccuracies and reputational risk before publication.

As organisations favour generative AI tools to assist with drafting, summarising and repurposing content, managing editors must also help mitigate AI-generated inaccuracies, plagiarism, artificial expertise and hallucination and other risks.

Human capabilities

• Attention to detail: essential for editing, fact-checking, consistency, governance and quality control. 
• Critical thinking: strong editors interrogate assumptions, validate claims and challenge weak or unsupported content. 
• Emotional intelligence: essential for managing contributors, navigating feedback, balancing competing stakeholder expectations and exercising editorial judgement with diplomacy and nuance. 
• Ethical reasoning: vital given misinformation, AI-generated inaccuracies, plagiarism and reputational risk
• Sound judgement: arguably the defining capability, managing editors constantly assess accuracy, risk, credibility, appropriateness and editorial quality.

Storyteller

Every piece of effective content begins with a story. Whether communicated through text, audio, video, imagery or live experience, storytelling shapes how people interpret information, form emotional connections, remember ideas and assign meaning. 

Strong storytellers help organisations communicate in ways that feel credible, distinctive, human and emotionally resonant. It’s about helping audiences understand why something matters, who it affects, what is at stake and why they should care. This necessitates:

• human observation
• emotional nuance
• contextual understanding, and
• originality.

In most organisations, storytelling is not the responsibility of one individual. It is a capability that should exist across leadership, marketing, communications and content teams.

Human capabilities

• Curious: great storytellers are naturally inquisitive and constantly exploring people, ideas, motivations and patterns. 
• Emotional intelligence: essential for understanding audience psychology, tone, nuance and human behaviour. 
• Research skills: strong storytelling depends on substance, accuracy, context and insight. 
• Sound judgement: necessary, as storytellers must distinguish between interesting and irresponsible, persuasive and manipulative, authentic and synthetic. 
• Storytelling: obviously foundational, it is the ability to structure narrative, emotion, meaning and persuasion.

Marketing technologist

There is now a dizzying array of platforms, applications and AI-powered tools designed to make marketing more efficient, scalable and personalised. Organisations can automate everything from content production and workflow management to audience segmentation, analytics and distribution.

The challenge is no longer access to technology. It is understanding:

• which technologies genuinely add value
• how systems integrate
• where automation should and should not be used, and
• how to operationalise these tools effectively and responsibly.

Your marketing technologist sits at the intersection of marketing, technology and operations. Their role centres on ensuring technology supports broader commercial and strategic objectives by way of:

• automation design
• workflow integration
• martech stack management
• prompt systems
• analytics implementation, and
• platform governance.

As AI adoption accelerates, marketing technologists are helping organisations balance efficiency, scalability, governance, creativity and human judgement.

Human capabilities

• Analytical thinkingb essential for interpreting marketing performance, automation workflows, attribution and customer behaviour. 
• Problem solving: martech environments are complex; troubleshooting systems, integrations and workflows is central to the role. 

Digital asset manager

As organisations produce more content across more channels, managing organisational knowledge becomes more challenging. Images, video, documents, templates and AI-generated assets must be governed, organised, searchable and trusted if they are to deliver ongoing value.

Your digital asset manager is responsible for creating, implementing and continually improving the organisation’s digital asset management strategy, governance framework and supporting systems. This includes:

• taxonomy and metadata management
• rights and usage controls
• version control
• archival processes
• workflow integration, and 
• ensuring assets remain searchable, compliant and reusable across the organisation.

As AI becomes embedded within content operations, metadata quality and asset governance are distinguishing features. Poorly organised assets create operational inefficiency, duplication, compliance risk and retrieval problems – particularly at scale.

Human capabilities

• Knowledge management: understanding how information is created, organised, governed and reused across the organisation. 

• Judgement: determining what content should be retained, archived, governed, surfaced or retired. 

• Attention to detail: essential for metadata quality, rights management, version control and compliance. 

• Systems thinking: understanding how content, technology, governance and business processes interact across the organisation.

Graphic designer

Visual communication remains critical to effective content marketing. Today, organisations have access to an extraordinary range of low-cost and AI-assisted design tools. Platforms such as Canva have democratised content creation and enabled non-designers to produce competent visual assets quickly and affordably.

But competent is not the same as strategic.

AI can generate visuals. Templates can accelerate production. Neither guarantees effective communication.

Experienced graphic designers do far more than make things look good. They solve communication problems visually. They understand hierarchy, typography, brand systems, audience behaviour and how design influences perception, usability and trust. They make deliberate decisions about what audiences notice, how information is interpreted and what actions people take next.

With AI rapidly commoditising basic content production, visual judgement becomes more valuable. Organisations that communicate clearly, consistently and credibly will continue to differentiate themselves from those that simply produce more content.

Human capabilities

• Audience empathy: understanding how different audiences interpret, consume and respond to visual information. 
• Attention to detail: precision is critical in typography, layout, spacing, brand consistency and production quality. 
• Collaborative: modern design work is highly cross-functional across marketing, digital, strategy, UX and content teams. 
• Design sense: the foundational capability; without it, the rest matters far less.
• Problem solving: great designers solve communication and usability challenges, not just aesthetic ones.

Search strategist

Search is evolving rapidly. Traditional SEO now exists alongside AI overviews, zero-click search, conversational search, platform discovery and large language model (LLM) visibility.

As a result, contemporary search strategy now extends beyond keyword rankings and technical optimisation. It involves understanding search intent, semantic relevance, authority signals, content discoverability, user behaviour and how algorithms surface, summarise and interpret information.

Your search strategist will develop and oversee your organisation’s search visibility strategy across both traditional and emerging search ecosystems, including visibility optimisation for AI-assisted search environments as well as:

• structured data
• keyword and intent research
• link acquisition
• analytics interpretation, and
• search performance monitoring.

Human capabilities

• Adaptable: search ecosystems evolve rapidly due to algorithm changes, AI overviews, zero-click search and platform disruption. 
• Analytical thinking: interpreting search behaviour, performance trends, intent signals and algorithm impacts. 
• Attention to detail: technical SEO, metadata, redirects, indexing and content optimisation all require precision. 
• Curiosity: SEO changes constantly; strong practitioners are naturally investigative and continually learning. 
• Problem solving: diagnosing ranking drops, technical issues, traffic anomalies and performance bottlenecks.

Final thoughts

AI is likely to continue reducing the cost of producing content, automating workflows and improving operational efficiency. However, the capabilities that determine whether content is relevant, credible, differentiated and strategically valuable remain fundamentally human. As content becomes easier to create, distinctly human skills and traits become more important, not less.

Jacqueline Burns is the founder of Market Expertise

Image: Supplied