Five years ago, when your potential customers had a problem, they’d start furiously googling to find a solution to that problem, they’d find your website and blog posts, do a little research to nail down their options, and they’d find their way into downloading your lead magnet, entering your nurture campaign on their merry way to becoming a customer.
Now when they have that same problem, they’re asking an LLM or Google for an answer, and getting the information they need before ever visiting your website. If they do end up coming to your website, it’s probably because they already know you’re the solution – i.e. they’re not looking for proof anymore, just confirmation (or conversion)
The Jobs to be Done framework refers to these problems to be solved as “Jobs” because just as people hire plumbers to help them fix leaky sinks, or pilots to fly airplanes, people “hire” products or services (or marketing!) when “jobs” arise in their businesses or their lives.
AI hasn’t changed that – customers are still hiring marketing to help them find solutions to their problems. What’s changed is the specific job that customers are hiring marketing to do, and if you don’t figure out what that new job is, you’re going to end up building marketing that nobody hires.
What Is the Jobs to be Done Framework?
Jobs to be done is basically this: People aren’t hiring your product or your company—they’re hiring your results. The framework, pioneered by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, flips traditional marketing thinking on its head. Instead of asking “who is my customer?” you ask “what job are they trying to get done?”
It’s easy with trades. As we already mentioned – if you’re a plumber, they’re hiring you to fix their sink. It’s tougher in SaaS, but you have to think backwards from the solution to the problem they’re having to figure out the job they’re hiring you for. Say you sell a reporting solution for Business Central, what they’re really hiring you for isn’t to create reports—it’s to deliver timely, actionable data to help them make business decisions faster.
The framework recognizes three types of jobs. Functional jobs are the practical stuff: commute to work, organize files, fix the damn printer. Emotional jobs are about feelings: feel confident, avoid looking incompetent in meetings, sleep better at night. Social jobs are about perception: look competent to your boss, signal innovation to peers, prove you’re not stuck in 2025.
The most famous example is the milkshake study. A fast-food chain wanted to sell more milkshakes and kept tweaking the product—thicker, fruitier, chunkier—but nothing moved the needle. Then they started paying attention to who was buying milkshakes and when. Morning commuters were “hiring” milkshakes to make their boring commute more interesting and to keep them full until lunch. The milkshake did that job way better than a bagel, banana, or coffee.
Once they understood the job, everything changed.
This matters for marketing because traditional segmentation—demographics, firmographics, those detailed personas—tells you who your customers are, but JTBD tells you why they buy. In a world where AI can tell them who sells what they need, the why becomes your only real differentiator.
How AI Changed Everything (Again)
The emergence of conversational AI has fundamentally changed how customers research, evaluate, and decide. Customers now have tireless AI research assistants. When someone needs to understand a complex topic or compare solutions, they ask their AI assistant, which synthesizes everything, compares options based on their specific criteria, and presents clear recommendations. The functional job of “find me information” that customers used to hire your marketing content to do is now done by AI, faster and more comprehensively than any single company’s marketing could manage.
The job has shifted from “find me information” to “help me make sense of information.” Customers aren’t information-starved anymore—they’re drowning in it. What they need isn’t more content. The need meaning, interpretation, and context specific to their unique situation.
Personalization expectations have skyrocketed. After conversing with AI that adapts to their exact questions, needs, and speech patterns in real-time, customers expect every interaction to feel tailored to them. The old model of “segment your email list into three personas” feels laughably crude.
Speed and immediacy are baseline, not differentiators. When customers can get answers in seconds from AI, waiting 24 hours for an email response feels painfully slow.
Trust becomes even more critical. Here’s the paradox: as AI makes information more accessible, it simultaneously makes information less trustworthy. Customers know AI can hallucinate, that misinformation spreads instantly, and that AI-generated content is everywhere (maybe even in this blog post!). Customers need marketing to help them verify what’s real, authenticate expertise, and distinguish genuine value from noise.
Consider this: A B2B buyer researching project management software used to visit your website, download your comparison guide, read 2 blog posts, and attend a webinar. That journey took weeks. Now they ask Copilot, Chat GPT, or Claude: “Compare Asana, Monday.com, and ClickUp for a 50-person marketing agency currently using spreadsheets, prioritizing ease of adoption and integration with Slack.” Thirty seconds later, they have a detailed analysis without visiting your website.
The buyer still has jobs to be done. But the jobs they’re hiring marketing to do have fundamentally changed.
What is Marketing Being Hired to Do?
If AI has automated the traditional information-delivery jobs of marketing, what’s left? Marketing’s job description is evolving toward distinctly human value. Here are the five core jobs customers are now hiring marketing to do:
Authentic Connection Over Information Delivery. Customers can get facts from AI. What they can’t get is a genuine relationship with your brand. The new job is creating authentic human connection—being approachable, real, and genuinely invested in customer success. This shows up in community building, responsive social presence, founder-led content that shows actual personality, and customer stories that reveal human impact.
Context and Meaning-Making. AI can synthesize information, but it struggles with deep context about your specific situation, industry nuances, or the subtle ways your circumstances affect what solution is right for you. Customers are hiring marketing to provide interpretation and wisdom that transforms raw information into actionable insight. When you share not just what worked but why it worked and what conditions need to be present for it to work differently, you’re doing a job AI can’t replicate.
Trust Verification in an AI World. In an environment where AI-generated content is everywhere, distinguishing real expertise from synthetic content becomes critical. Marketing must prove authenticity and demonstrate genuine expertise. This means showing your work, being transparent about processes and results including failures, featuring real customers with verifiable results, and demonstrating consistency over time.
Seamless AI-Enhanced Experiences. Customers are hiring your marketing to work well with their AI tools. They want your information to be easily discoverable and usable by their AI assistants. The job of marketing now includes making your content AI-readable, your value proposition crystal clear, and your differentiation easy for AI to understand and convey.
Emotional and Social Job Fulfillment. As AI automates functional jobs, the emotional and social dimensions become even more important than they already were. Customers hire marketing to help them feel confident, validated, and proud of their choices. A project management tool isn’t just hired to organize tasks—it’s hired to make teams feel efficient and modern. Marketing’s job is to speak to these emotional and social dimensions explicitly.
The Milkshake Study: AI Edition
Let’s reimagine how that milkshake research would play out today, because it reveals everything about how JTBD and marketing have evolved.
In the original study, the team observed customers, conducted interviews, discovered that morning commuters were hiring milkshakes to make their long commute more interesting and to stay full until lunch. The insight led to marketing and product changes focused on that specific job.
Here’s what would happen now. Before researchers even show up, potential milkshake buyers would have already asked their AI: “What’s a good breakfast for my commute that keeps me full and isn’t messy?” The AI would provide ten options with nutritional breakdowns, convenience ratings, and cost comparisons. The milkshake might not even make the list.
So the functional job of “find me a convenient breakfast” can now be handled by AI before the customer even considers the milkshake. The fast-food chain can’t compete on information delivery anymore.
But here’s where it gets interesting. Let’s say the customer does still buy the milkshake (despite AI recommendations.) Why? What job is the milkshake actually being hired for now?
The new jobs are emotional and social. “This milkshake makes my terrible commute feel like a small treat I’m giving myself.” Or “I’m the kind of person who doesn’t obsess over optimal nutrition for every meal.” Or “I know this milkshake—I don’t trust AI recommendations because it sent me to a place that gave me food poisoning.” Or “The person at the drive-through remembers my order and that human interaction matters.”
AI can’t deliver any of those jobs.
So if the fast-food chain wanted to market milkshakes in the AI era, their marketing would need to shift entirely. They wouldn’t focus on “convenient breakfast option” because AI handles that comparison and the milkshake probably loses anyway. They’d focus on the emotional reward, the nostalgia, the small moment of joy, the human touchpoint in an increasingly automated world.
The lesson: The milkshake’s functional job is now commoditized by AI research. But the emotional and social jobs became more valuable. The marketing needs to speak directly to those jobs, because that’s what customers are actually hiring the brand for now.
Your product’s functional job might be getting automated or compared away by AI. But the emotional and social jobs are your new competitive advantage – but only if your marketing is willing to talk about them explicitly.
Applying JTBD Framework to Your Marketing Strategy
Here’s how to actually apply this. Map the actual jobs your customers are hiring you for—with AI in mind. Conduct JTBD interviews specifically asking about how customers use AI in their research. Ask: “When you were looking for a solution, what were you trying to accomplish? How did AI factor into your research? What did AI provide, and what gaps remained? What made you decide to engage with our brand specifically?”
Identify which jobs AI has automated. Audit your existing marketing honestly. That comprehensive comparison guide? AI might generate something similar in seconds. Those basic how-to posts? AI handles that faster. Recognize where you need to evolve.
Redesign your content strategy around the new jobs. Shift from high-volume generic content to fewer but deeper pieces that show real expertise and context. Invest in video and community building because these create connection AI cannot. Make your best insights freely available rather than gated—in an AI world, thought leadership builds trust more than lead capture.
Test messaging that addresses new jobs explicitly. If your messaging focuses on information delivery or basic differentiation, it won’t resonate with customers who can get that from AI. Test messaging like: “Join 5,000 marketing leaders navigating AI disruption together” or “See how teams like yours actually implement this in practice.”
Build for AI discoverability. Make it easy for AI tools to find, understand, and accurately represent your value. Use structured data, clear consistent messaging, and comprehensive authoritative content. If someone asks ChatGPT about solutions in your category, you want to be among the sources it references.
Focus metrics on job completion, not vanity metrics. If the job is building trust, measure engagement depth and community participation. If the job is providing context, measure how often your content gets cited or shared. If the job is connection, measure relationship quality indicators.
The Path Forward
The jobs to be done framework reveals a fundamental truth: the function of marketing isn’t fixed, it’s dynamic, and it’s defined by the jobs customers need done in their specific context. As AI reshapes that context, marketing’s job description necessarily evolves.
This isn’t about AI replacing marketing. It’s about AI automating the commodity aspects (information delivery, basic research, surface-level comparison) and elevating the truly human aspects: connection, wisdom, trust, meaning, and identity.
The marketers who will thrive are those who embrace this shift. Stop trying to compete with AI on information delivery. Stop creating generic content that AI can generate better. Lean into what only you can do: build genuine relationships, share hard-won expertise and context, demonstrate authentic value, and help customers feel confident about their decisions.
The paradox of AI in marketing is this: as machines get better at handling information, humans become more valuable for providing meaning. The job customers are hiring marketing to do has changed, but it hasn’t disappeared. In many ways, it’s more important than ever.
Start by asking yourself the most important JTBD question: What job is my customer really hiring me for? Not what job I was hired for five years ago. Not what job I wish I was hired for. What job, in a world where all of customers have AI assistants, does my marketing actually need to do right now?
Answer that question honestly, redesign your strategy around it, and your marketing will keep all the boys coming to your yard.