INBOX INSIGHTS: AI Strategy Gaps, Marketing Hiring Demand (2026-04-22)

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INBOX INSIGHTS: AI Strategy Gaps, Marketing Hiring Demand (2026-04-22)

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The Strategy You Already Have Isn’t the Problem

I want to share something I’ve been hearing on almost every client call for the last six months. It comes in different words, but it’s always the same conversation.

“We’ve been to the workshops. We had the leadership offsite. We hired a consultant — sometimes two. We have the deck. We have the strategy. We have the KPIs. We have an AI champion and a Slack channel and a quarterly review on the calendar.”

Then a pause.

“And nothing is actually happening.”

I used to think the problem with AI adoption was that companies didn’t understand the technology well enough. So we wrote frameworks. We ran trainings. We built the kind of educational content that gets people to nod and say, “Okay, now I get it.”

I wasn’t wrong, exactly. It’s just that the problem has moved.

Here’s where it moved to. Every leader I talk to today already gets it. They’ve watched the keynotes. They’ve read the McKinsey reports. They’ve watched their analysts demo a five-minute prompt that did three hours of work. They are not, in any meaningful sense, uneducated about generative AI.

What they don’t know is what to do about it on Monday morning, in the org they actually have, with the budget they actually have, and the people who actually report to them.

That’s not a knowledge gap; that’s an execution gap, and it’s a much harder problem.

Why the strategy work doesn’t bridge the gap

Most “AI strategy” work stops at the part that’s fun: vision statements, use case mapping, and maturity models with little blue dots. The deliverable is a deck that says, “here’s where AI fits in your business.” Then everyone goes back to their inbox.

Strategy firms hand you a roadmap and leave. Engineering shops hand you a pilot and leave. There’s a missing middle that no one wants to claim. It’s the part where you identify who does the work, how the workflow changes, what decisions shift, and how you’ll assess if it’s working in three months.

That middle is the whole game, and it’s the part that doesn’t fit on a slide.

The diagnostic question

If you want to test whether your AI work has crossed the gap, here’s the question I use:

Can you name an AI workflow that will be active in your business in 30 days? It should have an assigned owner, a clear input, a measurable output, and someone to confirm it’s working.

If the answer is “well, we have a strategy that says…” — you’re still in the gap.

If the answer is “we’re piloting a few things…” — you might be in the gap. Pilots without owners and success metrics are usually busywork in a fancy hat.

If the answer is a sentence with a name, a workflow, and a number — congratulations. You’re past it.

Most teams I talk to are not past it. And it’s not because their strategy is wrong. It’s because there’s no operating model underneath the strategy that turns “we will use AI” into “Brian uses AI to do this specific thing by Thursday and reports the results on Friday.”

This is the work that’s missing

For the last year we’ve been turning the work we do with our consulting clients into something a leader can run on their own. Not another AI primer. Not twenty hours of video about prompt engineering. A self-paced course that walks you through the work between strategy and execution — the work almost nobody is teaching because it’s not as glamorous as the demo. Go at your own pace. Rewatch the parts you need. Skip the parts you don’t.

It’s called The AI-Ready Strategist. It’s built around the three frameworks we use with every consulting client: the 5P Framework by Trust Insights™ (the readiness lens that forces you to start with a measurable question instead of a tool), TRIPS (the scoring system that tells you which tasks to hand to AI first, and which ones to keep firmly in human hands), and the 6C Data Quality Framework (the foundational work without which none of the rest is safe).

It is the work I wish every team had done before they hired us. Some teams will still need to hire us — that’s fine. But most won’t if they do this work first.

Over the next three weeks, I’m going to walk through each of these frameworks, because the missing middle between “we have a strategy” and “we have an AI workflow producing results” is where every team I talk to is stuck. If you’ve got the deck and not the workflow, this series is for you.

👉 The AI-Ready Strategist: academy.trustinsights.ai/courses/ai-ready-strategist

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In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss how to overcome the fear of falling behind in the rapidly changing world of artificial intelligence. You’ll learn why comparing your human capability to machine learning creates unnecessary stress. You’ll discover how the 5P framework helps you clarify your role and purpose when you use AI tools. You’ll master the shift from technical obsession to result-driven strategy to improve your professional performance. You’ll gain a practical roadmap for aligning your business goals with the right technology.

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In this week’s Data Diaries, it’s time to take a look at marketing hiring demand from the selected sample of Indeed.com’s 6 major indices. What’s happening in the world of marketing hiring?

It’s been a bit more than two months since we’ve taken a look at the hiring demand in marketing; the last time we looked, the war started in the Middle East by America had not been underway. Since then, that conflict and all the uncertainty around it has had a nearly uniform depressing effect on marketing hiring demand.

Usually, hiring demand markets don’t march in sync around the world; some markets rise while others fall, except in very unusual circumstances (like the COVID pandemic in 2020). Australia in particular had been having a good start to 2026 along with Germany until war broke out.

What we see now is almost every market except France having hiring demand for marketers decline significantly in the last 60 days. This is rational and expected; with energy costs spiking and markets uncertain, companies are reluctant to add headcount.

We see this in the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’ FRED data system when looking at the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ JOLTS data. JOLTS stands for job openings and labor turnover survey, a monthly look at job openings, hires, quits, layoffs – essentially the churn in the employment market. Let’s look at the USA specifically to see what’s happening.

When we look at total nonfarm hires, seasonally adjusted, we see something shocking: hiring is at a 5 year low – and this is pre-war data because of the government shutdown causing gaps in the data that haven’t caught up yet.

Meanwhile, total separations – people leaving a job for any reason, voluntary or not – are at 5 year lows.

This paints a complete picture – the market is essentially frozen. People aren’t leaving jobs, but companies aren’t hiring either.

So what does all this mean to you, practically? At a person level, if you’re in a job now, keep it unless it’s intolerable, and do what you can to continue growing your personal professional network. If a layoff occurs, finding a new place to land will be more difficult than it has been in the last 5 years. Having a side hustle is prudent; adding additional streams of income, no matter how small, is a sensible thing to do these days. In a frozen job market, raises are likely almost non-existent.

At an organization level, if you’re hiring, expect a deluge of candidates. That’s both good and bad – you can pick up some great talent you might otherwise not have access to, but your HR teams will be fried as they try to manage the flood.

At a business services level, expect to see consulting demand increase. Businesses need to get work done, and if they can’t add headcount, they have to find labor substitutions for headcount. While AI is incredibly powerful and capable, its adoption is still uneven and many companies lag far behind what the technology is capable of.

Until the uncertainty in the markets cool, expect the current situation to be the status quo. Keep an eye on both the headlines and these indices.

Almost every AI course is the same, conceptually. They show you how to prompt, how to set things up – the cooking equivalents of how to use a blender or how to cook a dish. These are foundation skills, and while they’re good and important, you know what’s missing from all of them? How to run a restaurant successfully. That’s the big miss. We’re so focused on the how that we completely lose sight of the why and the what.

This is why our capstone course, the AI-Ready Strategist, is different. It’s not a collection of prompting techniques or a set of recipes; it’s about why we do things with AI. AI strategy has nothing to do with prompting or the shiny object of the day — it has everything to do with extracting value from AI and avoiding preventable disasters. This course is for everyone in a decision-making capacity because it answers the questions almost every AI hype artist ignores: Why are you even considering AI in the first place? What will you do with it? If your AI strategy is the equivalent of obsessing over blenders while your steakhouse goes out of business, this is the course to get you back on course.

👉 Take this course now to become an AI leader

Here’s a roundup of who’s hiring, based on positions shared in the Analytics for Marketers Slack group and other communities.

Are you a member of our free Slack group, Analytics for Marketers? Join 4000+ like-minded marketers who care about data and measuring their success. Membership is free – join today. Members also receive sneak peeks of upcoming data, credible third-party studies we find and like, and much more. Join today!

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