What Happens When Companies Cut Too Deep? (Part 2)

In Part 1, we looked at how marketing talent with experience and expertise is surviving the current wave of AI disruption. Now, let’s consider a new pattern that is emerging.

What is the ghost workforce?

The Content Marketing Institute’s 2026 Career and Salary Outlook introduced the concept of the “ghost workforce” – an invisible labor pool made up of marketers quietly absorbing the roles of two or three people at a time. Few companies are directly replacing marketers with AI. Instead, they’re allowing layoffs, attrition, and slow hiring to shrink marketing headcount while workloads stay flat or increase.

HubSpot’s 2026 State of Marketing confirms the scale of this: more than 73% of marketers report their workload increased over the past year, while most companies kept team sizes flat. Is this a sustainable operating model?

The burden falling on overextended teams is a problem, but the less visible issue is what the org chart looks like in five years when that junior pipeline has dried up.

How companies are recalibrating as AI technology shifts

Job listings for marketers, copywriters, and content roles have shown a partial revival as employers quietly restaff positions they recently eliminated. A Washington Times article reported that Forrester Research estimated that 55% of employers regret laying off workers for AI-related reasons. A former human resources officer at Meta and Amazon was also quoted: “Some organizations moved quickly from ‘AI can assist this work’ to ‘AI can replace this work,’ and they are now recalibrating as they better understand where humans still add critical value.”

Companies are making workforce decisions based on where AI is right now, while the technology is still shifting underneath them. That argues for patience on headcount reduction. The companies maintaining a balance of people doing higher-value work and using AI to make them better at it are winning.

What might happen in the long term?

Korn Ferry’s research found that while cutting entry-level hires may increase savings in 2026 and 2027, drying up this pipeline to future leaders could open the door to a long-term leadership crisis.

Marketing organizations can build senior talent from within – junior marketers become mid-level specialists, who become the strategic leaders that organizations pay a premium for. That pipeline takes a decade to develop. MIT researcher Andrew McAfee put it plainly: cutting entry-level jobs risks undermining both near-term cost efficiency and long-term workforce development.

What to consider for your marketing team’s future

A few questions worth sitting with before restructuring around AI capabilities:

• Is the work actually going away? If execution is being automated, someone still needs to direct it, review it, and ensure it’s on-strategy.
• Are you investing in your junior talent, or just cutting it? IBM’s approach is instructive: rather than eliminating early-career roles, they’re rewriting them – shifting junior workers away from routine tasks and toward higher-value work alongside AI.
• Are you providing real AI training? Research shows that employees who are taught how to use AI are overwhelmingly more likely to adopt it effectively. In an intergenerational organization, marketing leaders can tap the technological strengths of younger workers, as well as the professional judgment, strategic thinking and lived experiences of older workers, by pairing them together.
• Are you getting pressure to demonstrate quick adoption of AI automation, but not seeing returns on investment?

What does your team need to do the work that matters? One possibility: senior marketers with AI fluency, early-career talent with the training to grow into that judgment, and the flexibility to bring in specialized expertise when the moment requires it. Let us know how we can help.

Editor’s Note: Next, we look at what specific fluencies marketing leaders need now. Read Part 3 of the series.