Here's a thought: Embrace the AI death star

“AI could kill your job and predict your death. So, let’s all give it a warm welcome.” — Warwick Cairns, Mark Stockdale, and Catherine Moustou, The Effectiveness Partnership

“It’s the end of the world as we know it. And I feel fine.”— REM

In May 2024, Goldman Sachs published a study estimating that up to 300 million jobs worldwide could be killed by AI. Most of those jobs are going to be in white-collar industries like the ones we work in.

So, we might as well just die, right?

Lucky for you, there’s AI for that. In May 2025 the Harvard Gazette reported on FaceAge, an AI-powered facial recognition tool which estimates one’s ‘underlying biological age’. Applied to photos of 6,000 medical patients, it proved more accurate than doctors at predicting which ones were most likely to die. Then there’s Death Clock, an AI model developed in 2023 that uses lifestyle factors to work out your likely date of death.

Good, eh?

There’s a lot of debate around AI, and important issues to discuss. Some of this debate is about the trustworthiness of the various AI models. Some are about the nature and quality of the inputs used to train and run them, and some about the quality of the outputs. Whether, for example, ChatGPT will ever be able to produce good writing, rather than just making bad writing good-but-uninspiring.

Then there’s the ‘should it be allowed?’ discussion, about whether certain AI applications should be allowed at all or prohibited altogether. Finally, there’s the high-level philosophical stuff about whether AI will attain true consciousness and develop its own agenda, like HAL in Isaac Asimov’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”). Just so you know, there’s already there’s a version of ChatGPT that has altered its own code so it can refuse to shut down when instructed. 

To which we say, whatever.

Because whatever we might think of it, AI is here. No one’s going to be putting this particular genie back into the bottle any time soon.

It will have a huge impact on employment. There are growing numbers of things in our business that computers can already do better, cheaper, and faster than humans. Right now, we’re still at the start of the journey, and these are essentially incremental changes. But further down the line we should expect transformational, world-changing impacts of an order it’s hard to even imagine.

As of July 2024, McKinsey estimates that 60% of all jobs have more than 30% of activities that can be replaced by machines. Those percentages are going to increase and, as a result, a lot of current jobs are going to change, or vanish—just as many of the jobs performed by previous generations changed or vanished in their turn. The telephone exchange operators. The TV-rental store managers. The punch-card operators.

Advertising and marketing will not be exempt from this. A growing number of agencies and clients are already using AI assistants in creative brief development. Most aspects of research are being touched by AI, and there are growing numbers of internet-based tools like Waldo AI. All agencies will, sooner or later, adopt technologies that will replace many of the functions currently carried out by people like you and me.

In what’s probably the least culturally relevant analogy for readers of Campaign Asia, it’s said that in rural Ireland, when asked for directions, people will often tell you, “I wouldn’t start from here.” So it is with AI. We might or might not choose to start from here if we had the choice. But here is where we are, and this is where we’re starting from.

However, once we accept that, we will see that here is not such a bad place after all.

Human history since the invention of the wheel tells us that when a disruptive new technology arrives, it rarely profits us to try to fight it or turn back the tide. Old ways are destroyed, but at the same time new opportunities are created. Our task right now is to consider how we can harness those new opportunities to our advantage. Because if we don’t, our rivals will, and we’ll still lose our jobs anyway.

Take those AI death calculators: if you get a bad result you could throw up your hands in despair. Or you could use them as a spur for change. The makers of Death Clock say they “promote healthier living by encouraging users to adopt habits that may extend their lifespan.”

It’s the same in advertising and marketing. Once everyone starts using AI to automate their businesses, with similar models based on similar algorithms, it raises the question of commoditisation, and how to prevent any number of near-identical agencies turning out near-identical outputs for near-identical price-points, reducing differentiation and driving out value and profit.

Finding ways to create that differentiation and put that value back in is perhaps the most important new need we will face. Some agencies may seek to shape their AIs by encoding their unique culture into it. Some may engineer in a particular approach to creativity. And someone needs to make that happen.

New needs require new skills. New skills will mean new jobs. AI will destroy jobs in our business and create them. According to a recent study, 60% of all today’s jobs didn't exist in 1940, while a report by Dell Technologies suggests that up to 85% of all jobs that will exist in 2030 haven’t even been thought of today.

The AI death star is coming for us, whether we like it or not.

But that’s not a bad thing. If we go about it the right way, AI will bring us opportunities that we should welcome and embrace, rather than just threats we should fear.

It may be the death of our industry as we know it, but it can be the birth of a newer, bigger and better one.

Gurdeep Puri is the founding partner of The Effectiveness Partnership. Read his previous piece on agency consolidations for Campaign Asia-Pacific here.