Episode 88 - 2025 content predictions (and thank YOU)
Read more
.png)
Way back in November of 2020, I wrote about the 7 skills that help content marketers thrive at work. I considered these evergreen skills and that article an evergreen article. I didn’t really expect to need to update it.
But for all the hype and chaos, AI has changed this. And that has prompted (see what I did there?) the need for an addendum. First, let’s quickly review the seven skills.
I think every content marketer should invest in the development of the first seven skills. The ability to communicate well, put thoughts into writing and get a project across the finish line are more valuable than ever.
I find that many content marketers follow the same path from 0 to 1. Beyond that, the path branches a lot. Some people aspire to be marketing directors or CMOs. Others love high-level individual contributor work and want to hone their craft. And still others go on to build businesses in the content space, leveraging these skills as a foundation. Regardless of what you do once the foundation is built, these seven skills will be incredibly valuable.
AI was obviously not on my radar in 2020. The game has changed and you can’t ignore the need to upskill—or cross-skill or even sometimes down-skill if we’re being honest. AI is a strange technology in that it’s partially been forced on us. Many people are still figuring out how to use it, which is a strange issue unique to AI. The promise of it is always a few steps ahead of the current state. It’s difficult to ignore and still thrive in your career, even when it’s not at all clear that AI is making our work better, customers happier and businesses more profitable.
Developer Anil Dash captures our current moment with AI perfectly in his recent article, The Majority AI View:
Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they've been over-hyped, the fact they're being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value.
I’m an AI optimist, but I couch my thinking in reality. AI for AI’s sake is useless (though I’ll admit I’ve had a lot of fun tinkering). I think this is worth stating explicitly before I tell you that you need to add an 8th skill to this list. You don’t need to love AI despite its flaws just because “everyone’s doing it.” You do, I humbly suggest, need to understand how to use it, where it can help you, how you can present your newly developed skills to potential employers and clients, and when to do things the old-fashioned way.
So yes, AI is the 8th skill and I see three sub-categories that I hope are specific enough to make sense in the context of your current work and career stage.
I’ll go into a bit more detail on each.
Something I see within the Superpath community and at Reforge is that the people gaining a reputation as AI marketers aren't the ones with the "best" AI workflow. They're the ones who try new things constantly (and, in many cases, talk about them in Slack groups and LinkedIn). Most experiments fail and at this stage, that's kind of the point.
This is a weird thing about AI. Technologies like the cloud and mobile devices presented us with obvious use cases. People wanted those things before the technology was actually ready. AI is kind of the opposite. We have this super powerful tool in our hands that we don’t exactly know how to use yet.
Last month, I tried using Claude's Projects feature to analyze a quarter's worth of customer feedback. I dumped in about 30 interview transcripts— something like 80,000 words of raw conversation. Instead of reading through all of them, which frankly I would never have done, I just started asking questions.
It worked incredibly well. I still had to read the actual quotes and verify context. It's not even that it saved me time. It's that it enabled me to do something that I just wouldn't have done otherwise. It would have taken me so long to go through these transcripts that I realistically probably would have gone through two or three and assumed that I could extrapolate patterns based on that small sample size.
This is a pretty basic AI use case and I'm not suggesting you need to be a full-time tinkerer to find things like this, but I do think it's worth developing the habit of at least trying to use an AI tool to do something that you typically do manually. And even better to look for ways to do things that you just can't or won't do right now.
The skill here isn't mastering any particular tool, it's just the willingness to try them and to push them to their boundaries. In my experience, exploration is extremely difficult to do in the course of your normal work because you still have to do your normal work. So adding a layer of experimentation on top of that means you work more and accomplish less. I find it's much better to dedicate specific time to experimentation.
When you approach it this way, I think that (1) you will have a lot more fun doing it. Experimentation for the sake of experimentation is actually a really nice break from our day-to-day work. And (2) it's a form of sharpening your saw. You might find ways to save yourself time but you might also find ways to open up new work streams that were previously blocked to you. You might dabble in a little bit of coding or design work. These may or may not be immediately applicable to your work but it will definitely expand your skill set and I'm certain you'll find things that make your day-to-day work better.
One thing AI can definitely do, probably today, is help you and your team or clients work more smoothly. It's an incredibly helpful workflow tool. You can use it to think through workflows and build them too. For those that rode the no-code wave over the last few years, this is kind of the new version of that.
The difference is that AI doesn't just connect your tools, it can actually do some of the work within the workflow. It can analyze, summarize, draft, format, brainstorm, etc.
I've found that AI is only somewhat useful for writing, but that was partially because I hadn't created a style guide. Once I realized that you could build your own style guide, the writing output I got from tools like Claude became so much better. And now anytime I use it to write, I provide my own edits on its work and then use that to update the style again. This is really easy to start. Just feed Claude a handful of articles that you have written yourself and ask it to make you a style guide and then update the style in Claude.
Here is my style guide. You can use it as a starting point for your own. (I used it to write a lot of this article!) I think it's a good idea to build this for yourself, for your company, for your founder or anyone else that you might write for, it adds consistency to the writing which is a fantastic way to build systems around your work to make it all run more smoothly.
I can't write an article about AI without talking at least a little bit about vibe coding, which is my own personal favorite AI work. (I highly recommend checking out our vibe coding workshop). Any time you need a simple tool or status checker or dashboard or form, consider vibe coding it. You can customize it to meet your exact needs and then connect it to other tools that you use so that data flows from one system to another. It will also help you spec out your problem very clearly. Your vibe-coded solution may not be long-term but it will help you deeply understand the problem so that you can either improve it or adopt a tool that meets all of your requirements.
The core of 8b is thinking systematically about your work. Where are the bottlenecks? What's repetitive? What falls through the cracks? Once you identify those spots, AI gives you options you didn't have before.
Start simple:
The payoff compounds. Every workflow you build makes the next one easier. You start seeing opportunities everywhere.
There is a new suite of content marketing tools emerging that have a much higher learning curve than ChatGPT or Claude. I’m talking about things like AirOps, Jasper, or custom automation tools built with Zapier, Make, or n8n. In my experience, these tools are very difficult to operate alongside a normal content role. You just need more time to learn them and operate them than you have if your plate is already mostly full.
We've all seen the term content engineering. And I think this is representative of a new work stream that many companies are adopting and a perfect example of a role that requires mastery of a specific set of tools.
The tool mastery path is for people who want to build and maintain content systems at scale. You're not just using AI to write faster, you're building content pipelines. Automatically generating programmatic SEO pages, aggregating massive data sets to use as context, building custom content workflows that connect five different tools, creating quality control systems that can process hundreds of pieces with minimal or no human review. These folks will probably also use AI to do at least some coding as well. It's a slightly more technical role but it's one I believe most content marketers can learn if they want to.
This is specialized work. If you're freelance or at a smaller company, you probably don't need to go this deep. Focus on 8a and 8b first. Get good at adopting new tools and building workflows. The deep tool expertise can come later if your career takes you in that direction.
Your career path is still going to be unpredictable. (Mine certainly has been.) But AI literacy is tablestakes now. If you want to accelerate this, consider joining Superpath Pro.
We run monthly AI workshops where members share what's working (and what's not). We also have a dedicated AI channel where your content peers are sharing ideas and talking through some of the issues they are running into putting this stuff into practice.
I'm not going to pretend we have all the answers, but we're all learning together, and honestly, that's the best way to do it. The Superpath community has been ahead of most of these trends because we share openly and experiment constantly.
Come join us. Let's figure out what's next.
.svg)
Jimmy is the cofounder and former CEO of Superpath. He's currently an advisor and contributor via the blog and podcast. You can follow him on LinkedIn.
