The Death of the Pyramid? What Deloitte’s Shake-Up Means for Marketing Teams
The consultancy world is built on a pyramid. You hire an army of juniors at the bottom to do the grunt work, and a few survive to become partners at the top. It has been this way for decades.
But the pyramid is crumbling.
Deloitte has just announced a massive overhaul of its workforce structure, changing job titles for 181,500 US employees starting in June 2026. They are moving away from the traditional, rigid ladder because, frankly, it’s outdated.
Why? Because AI is eating the bottom of the pyramid.
The Big Four firms have already begun slashing graduate intake - by as much as 29% in some cases - because AI can now handle the research, drafting, and data crunching that used to train the junior workforce.
This isn't just an accounting story. It is a preview of the future of marketing.
The Rise of the "Super-Generalist"
We’ve talked a lot about AI’s impact on marketing output, but we haven't talked enough about team structure.
In the old world, you needed a copywriter for words, a designer for visuals, and a strategist for the plan. Today, that line is blurring.
I see it in my own work. I am not a designer or a professional copywriter. Yet, with AI support, I regularly create high-quality assets and content that would have required a specialist two years ago.
AI empowers all marketers to become Generalists. It raises the "floor" of capability, allowing a strategist to execute creative work or a writer to build data visualisations. It speeds us up and removes the bottlenecks that used to slow down agile teams.
But... We Still Need the Specialist
Does this mean the death of the specialist? Absolutely not.
While AI allows me to create a good image, it doesn't give me the deep, intuitive understanding of visual trends that a professional designer has.
We still need Channel Specialists—experts with their fingers firmly on the pulse of their niche. AI can generate code, but it doesn't know the nuanced shifts in SEO best practices that happened yesterday. It can write a script, but it doesn't understand the cultural context of a TikTok trend like a creator does.
The New Shape of Marketing
If the "Pyramid" is dying, what replaces it?
I believe we are moving toward a Diamond structure.
Fewer Juniors: AI handles the admin and basic execution.
More "Super-Generalists" (The Fat Middle): Experienced marketers who use AI to execute across multiple disciplines (copy, design, strategy).
Deep Specialists: The experts who refine the output and guide the strategy where AI hits its ceiling.
Deloitte is changing its titles to reflect skills, not tenure. Marketing teams need to do the same. The future isn't about "how many years have you done this?" It's about "how much can you build with the tools you have?"
