Since ChatGPT launched almost three years ago, many, many people have claimed that copywriting is dead – or on its way to the grave. That’s concerning for copywriters and people considering copywriting as a career.
As someone who’s been writing copy professionally almost every day for over six years, here’s my take: copywriting is not dead. LLMs have chewed up the bottom half of the copywriting market, but they’re not capable of replacing skilled copywriters. At least, not yet.
(And, if you think they are, I challenge you to compare a project created with ChatGPT or some other LLM against a project created solely by a decent human copywriter on both cost and performance metrics. There’s a reason people like me still have jobs.)
‘Not yet’ is the operative phrase here. LLMs will keep getting more sophisticated. New, smarter forms of AI will emerge. At some point, hiring people to write words won’t make financial sense. Of course, few skilled copywriters just ‘write words’. We’re product marketers, psychologists, information architects, researchers, and messaging experts all at once.
So my prediction is that copywriting will evolve into something I’ll call ‘copy orchestration’.
Refresher: Copy Versus Content
Copy and content are different things. This article is about copywriting – words designed to elicit a specific action of some kind from consumers. (Content is any work that has been created primarily to add value for consumers by educating, entertaining and/or inspiring them.)
What Could the Future of Copywriting Look Like?
At this stage, true cognition is still out of reach for AI companies. LLMs are, at their core, just very sophisticated predictive models that spit out strings of words based on relationships found in their training data. They can’t, for example, autonomously run a campaign or draft website pages or define a product’s messaging.
(And, if AI does develop true cognition à la AGI, it will be equally capable of replacing everyone from business leaders to programmers, in which case discussions like this will be pointless. Bar regulatory intervention, wages for surviving jobs will rise massively and governments will need to roll out something like a universal basic income to fend off economic collapse.)
That means there are opportunities for copywriters in three main areas:
- coordinating and directing AI models that produce words
- bridging the digital gap – that is, bring information from the physical world into the digital one
- developing messaging (which relies on differentiation).
Coordination
Coordinating AI models is the most logical next step for copywriters. We’ve seen it in every other industry that’s been affected by automation. Machines take over repetitive tasks and eliminate X% of the total work, but still need to be controlled and monitored by humans.
As the raw output of LLMs becomes better, more and more of the actual writing will fall to them. The role of copywriters will be to deliver prompts, coordinate the text creation process, and fact-check claims. Some people believe that, ergo, prompt engineering is a good place to invest time and energy. I don’t. ChatGPT and other LLMs are literally built for non-technical users. It makes no sense to assume that their output will improve dramatically but prompting them will become complex enough to merit another skillset.
Instead, go back to the first principles of copywriting. Learn how people consume, parse and remember information. Understand information architecture – especially web page structures. Get comfortable with developing brand voices. Understand the nuances of copy across different distribution channels (SEO, email, print marketing, and so on). Those are the skills you’ll need to effectively direct AI.
Information Retrieval
The digital world is not the real world. Remember that. Many marketers live in a bubble – they think that everyone is chronically online and that everyone is obsessed with tech.
But that’s not reality. Thirty-seven percent of the world still doesn’t have internet access. In Australia, just 78.3% of the population has social media – down 2.3% YoY. Governments are cracking down on social media use among young people. Cash is still a thing. Until we all live in the Metaverse or data-collecting robots roam our homes and cities, someone will need to take the events and experiences that happen physically and translate them into the digital world.
Enter the copy orchestrator. This person spends a sizeable part of their day away from the computer, talking to customers and product engineers and SMEs. They look for the digital delta – the difference between information available in the physical world and the digital one. Their job is to distil those experiences into words that feel authentic in a way that synthetic copy doesn’t.
(This is how copywriters should ideally operate now. If AI can move us away from the ‘copy sweatshop’ model – copywriters chained to their screens, pushed by agencies and PMs to deliver more and more under ever-tightening timelines – it will be a net benefit for the industry.)
Keep in mind that digital delta will, by default, be short-lived. That original pain point your copywriter discovered by talking to actual ICP-fit buyers? As soon as it’s live, it will be crawled and scraped and commodified into ubiquity by hundreds of LLMs. Information retrieval will be an ongoing and important part of the copy orchestrator’s job.
Differentiation
In an AI future, there are no barriers to basic knowledge. We’ve been heading in that direction for decades already. Think back to when sales personnel were an essential information source for prospects. Today, in most categories, buyers can do 90% of their research without ever talking to another human.
That means copywriting (which, in complex categories, is often explanatory) will focus more and more on that essential question: why us? Differentiation will be what converts. In this world, it will be the role of the copy orchestrator to uncover USPs at the offering level.
Right now, that function is fulfilled by product marketers. But, as we’ve seen in other industries, automation and new tech tends to condense specialised roles. It’s likely parts of product marketing will be subsumed into copy orchestration (with others falling back under product management instead).
That means emerging copywriters should focus on the ability to distil features into messaging points. Many of us already do it informally, particularly at the SMB level. The copy orchestrator’s role, though, will have a dedicated product marketing component. At very small brands, they may even be responsible for firm-level differentiators and strategic narratives.
How Does It All Fit Together?
The copy orchestrator isn’t just a marketer by another name. A true generalist marketer is comfortable across the whole marketing spectrum, equally capable of setting pricing and coordinating sponsorships as they are launching a website or running Google Ads campaigns. But, like all generalists, they lack deep knowledge and skills in any single domain.
The copy orchestrator, by contrast, is a specialist in persuasion through words. Consider how that differs to other marketing domains. Visual designers use colours, shapes and images to reinforce marketing messages. Content orchestrators help consumers solve problems on their buying journeys through content. SEO specialists use search engines to improve brand visibility. PPC experts coordinate paid digital campaigns. Social media managers build communities in online spaces.
Each of those domains has strategic, operational, tactical and technical aspects. But the modern copywriter has little input into anything strategic or operational. The assets and channels that should fall under their purview – those relating primarily to persuasion through words – have been claimed by other domains and, in some large organisations, even other departments.
As copy orchestrator roles begin to manifest, though, and other, now-obsolete roles gradually disappear, those assets and channels will be returned to the fold. They’ll likely include product/service messaging, non-newsletter email, and, of course, websites.
If that sounds controversial, think about. What domain is best suited to own a brand’s website? SEO, with its inherent bias towards search outcomes? Web development, which is less a marketing domain than a software one? Content orchestration, carrying the full weight of the brand’s content program? The two arguments against Copy owning a website – that Copy isn’t a strategic domain, and that copywriters don’t have the capacity or skills breadth for it – both evaporate in the face of a fully fledged copy orchestrator.
Copy orchestrators will still work closely with other domains and departments. (A copy orchestrator leading a website build would need to coordinate with senior leadership, SEO, and Product for the website’s strategy, and with Design and Web Development for its delivery.) That work might come in the form of support requests, directives, or close collaboration.
Below, I’ve created a rough visualisation of what the relationships between common marketing domains could look like. (Note that these are domains, not channels.) It’s speculative and generalised, but it’s a starting point – a way for us to imagine how the role of copy orchestrator could begin to emerge across organisations.
What About at Agencies?
The current copywriting model suits marketing agencies well. Clients need words for collateral, and agencies have people who can write those words. Their output is pitched as being better-quality, faster, and more cost-effective than an in-house stakeholder’s.
But the copy orchestrator will change that. In many cases, an in-house copy orchestrator will be the first hire after a generalist marketing manager. Their role will be less about technical writing quality than coordination, information retrieval, and differentiation – and their productivity will be vastly improved by AI – so external copy orchestrators will have little value to add under the current agency model.
I say ‘current’ because there will still be opportunities for those that adapt. A vendor that works with multiple clients in the same industry has a unique advantage – its access to different but comparable sets of business and customer data means it can identify trends and patterns than an in-house copy orchestrator would miss.
That’s an advantage smart agencies are already leveraging. In a world with omnipresent AI, proprietary data will matter even more than it does now. Freelancers and smaller agencies will probably niche down to a handful of industries to gather as much as possible – perhaps they’ll even invest in their own industry-specific research pools, developing insights they’ll then deploy on behalf of clients. Larger agencies will continue to be multi-sectorial, but their in-house copy orchestrators will probably have ‘desks’ that focus solely on a handful of closely related verticals.
Full-service agencies do have some other advantages that will survive AI – cost efficiency, end-to-end offerings, tightly refined processes, the ability to quickly fill capacity gaps – but, from a copy orchestration perspective, that vantage point at the intersection of multiple clients will be their greatest.
Transformation, Not Death
At some point between Mad Men and ChatGPT, copywriters became technicians, relegated to the sidelines of strategy. The modern pureplay copywriter has no seat at the table. They’re an order-taker fighting LLMs and offshore talent over checklist tasks. Anything with a hint of messaging or strategy is owned by another, ‘more strategic’ domain.
If, as copywriter, you think, “Well, that’s not true – I do more than that!”, you’re probably right. Most of us do end up working on strategy and messaging and everything else. The issue, as I see it, is that we normally do so because there’s no-one else to do it (or because we offer other services, like content strategy and SEO), rather than because senior decision-makers think we’re the right people to own those initiatives.
The evolution to copy orchestration will change that. AI will do more of the technical work, freeing us up to focus on information retrieval and differentiation. We won’t ‘just’ be writers. We’ll be conductors, architects, communicators. The words will simply be conduits for our ideas – the way our profession originated.
So, if you’re wondering whether copywriting is dead in 2025, I say it’s not. But it will transform, radically. And that’s a very good thing.
