Publicis Media UK and Kingston University released new research earlier this month highlighting the AI-related skills gaps becoming increasingly prevalent within marketing teams.
The report, titled Welcome to the World of Fusion Skills, showed some surprising truths, including the fact that marketers are continuing to struggle with prompting, creativity is becoming compromised instead of elevated by AI, and middle managers are often ending up with more work than they had pre-AI.
The survey underpinning the paper was conducted between 2021 and 2025, with feedback from over 2000 leaders, making it one of the largest longitudinal studies in this field.
FutureWeek caught up with one of the report’s authors Dr. Evy Sakellariou, Associate Professor of Creativity and Innovation at Kingston Business School, to delve deeper into its findings.
The Demand for ‘Fusion Skills’
Reflecting the paper’s title, the report’s top-line argument is the need for what it calls ‘fusion skills’ – a new type of organisational skillset that combines traditional skills with new AI-focused ones. These new skills are grounded in working in collaboration with AI, instead of simply using it as a tool.
The paper outlines three AI ‘fusion skills’ – Human-AI Intelligent Interrogation, Reciprocal Apprenticing, and Judgement Integration.
‘Human-AI Intelligent Interrogation’ involves the ability of an employee to prompt effectively and challenge outputs from AI models. The report found that 40 percent of senior leaders feel this is the hardest capability.
‘Reciprocal Apprenticing’ is the ability to train AI agents properly, giving agents enough organisational context to make an off-the-shelf tool bespoke and trained on a company’s own data.
Finally, ‘Judgement Integration’ is the ability of staff to understand when to trust AI outputs and when to overrule them.
What Skills are Most Needed in an AI-First World?
Human-centric skills and a base-line of professional knowledge and expertise were identified as necessary to getting the most out of AI tools in the report. Sakellariou says: “What we found out is that in order for the workforce to develop fusion skills – which means to collaborate effectively with AI to create creative outcomes and services – they need to have very well-developed core foundational skills that the industry wants.”
“For example, creativity, great problem-solving, critical thinking, and communication. What we found is that if employees and managers do not have those skills well-developed, they actually cannot collaborate with the AI; they cannot leverage the capability of the AI,” explains Sakellariou.
The need for this baseline knowledge to get the most of AI is cited as what challenges junior marketers, and has an onset impact to those managing them.
The Changing Role of Managers and Junior Marketers
The impact of AI on junior marketing roles has been a topic of industry discussion since the emergence of GenAI. The report found that only a small four percent of employers feel young aspiring marketers are prepared to join an AI-powered workforce – with the current talent pipeline described as “not fit for purpose.”
Despite the promise of AI freeing up more time for marketers, the report uncovered that managers end up with more work after AI integration than pre-AI, as quality checking their team’s work becomes an integral part of their job. What’s more, when staff have limited knowledge of how to use AI effectively, this shifts even more work onto managers.
“We’ve seen from our research that AI has to build on human-centered skills” says Sakellariou. “When you don’t have those, you cannot work with this technology. It takes more time, you make mistakes, and you need help from others, and that creates mistakes, delays, and more workload for management and more experienced staff.”
Surprisingly, however, skills gaps amongst senior staff costs 150 percent more compared with junior staff. The report revealed the productivity cost for a senior employee is £18,343 per year – over 150 percent higher than the £7,081 cost for a junior employee – because strategic decision-making and problem-solving carry much more weight at the top.
Creativity Most at Risk
There has been a longstanding debate as to whether AI can truly be creative. This, at times, has manifested as backlash against AI as part of the creative process. The conversation has come a long way, with GenAI widely being accepted as a creative tool in the industry. However, the report’s findings reveal that despite AI speeding up production, AI flattens originality – creativity skills gaps accounting for 6 percent productivity losses in the industry.
Sakellariou explains: “Without genuinely new human insight, creative outcomes can become predictable and difficult to distinguish from the competition. So where is the competitive advantage?”
Indeed, this propensity towards GenAI outputs being the same or similar across the industry is often referred to as the ‘sea of sameness’. She continues: “And the danger is not that AI becomes more creative than people, it’s that organisations could rely on it so heavily that human curiosity, empathy and judgment are pushed out of the process.”
