Jellyfish Launches New AI Skills Framework for Marketers

Beyond Digital Maturity: Why Your Marketing Team Needs an AI Skills Framework Now

Digital Marketing has always been synonymous with disruption. For more than two decades, marketers have prided ourselves on our agility, navigating the shift from print to programmatic, mastering the nuance of social media, search algorithms and adapting to the evolving privacy regulations. Our industry has led the changes in technology, often as early adopters and change drivers.

Closing the Gap: Moving Beyond Tactical AI

And while GenAI and the ubiquitous access to new AI-based technologies are disrupting the world, marketing has long been utilizing algorithms and machine learning. While marketing is used to changing at speed, the current revolution is unprecedented. For years, it has operated silently in the background of our industry, powering the bid strategies in our ad consoles, the recommendation engines on our eCommerce sites, and the predictive modelling in our CRMs. We have been "AI-adjacent" for a long time. But to keep pace with this new world, we have to move beyond tactical experimentation and towards a structured, enterprise-wide mastery of these new skills and technology.

Moving Beyond the Legacy Maturity Models

We’ve moved from a world where AI optimized human-created content to one where AI collaborates in the creative process. This shift from analytical AI to generative and agentic AI requires a radical rethink of our skill sets. It is no longer enough to understand how to buy media; we must now understand how to engineer prompts, clean data for custom models, and manage the ethics of automated outputs.

In the past the Google and BCG “Digital Maturity Model” served as the gold standard for digitally savvy brands. It was, and remains, a brilliant tool for mapping the journey toward data-driven marketing. But as we navigate 2026, the landscape demands something more specific and technology-agnostic.

To move smarter, we need an AI Skills Framework for Marketers. We need a roadmap that isn't tied to a single vendor or platform, but rather focuses on the core competencies required to thrive in an AI-augmented economy. We need a way to codify excellence across functions, from the "Curious" beginner to the "Cutting-edge" innovator.

This is why our Digital Learning team at Jellyfish developed a comprehensive framework to guide this transition. This isn't an academic theory; it is a practical tool built by practitioners who are deploying AI for the world’s most ambitious brands every day. 

The North Star: Seven Domains, Four Levels

Our framework is designed to be the foundational "North Star" for any brand; it covers seven marketing domains and four proficiency levels. You can use it regardless of your size or sector to serve three primary strategic purposes:

• Benchmarking the AI journey: You can assess where your organization sits today. Are your teams merely "Curious" and experimenting with basic repurposing, or are they "Competent," integrating A/B testing and experimentation into their AI workflows?
• Skills mapping and identifying gaps: You can break down AI mastery into measurable learning outcomes, such as the ability to "Prepare marketing datasets for AI-powered analytics" or "Design hyper-personalization strategies using first-party data". Use the framework to highlight exactly where investment is needed.
• Future-proofing and planning: You can use it to build a structured path for career development. By outlining the progression toward "Cutting-edge" skills like budget forecasting driven by predictive AI, it helps your marketers understand the trajectory of their own professional growth.

Human-Centric Strategy in an AI Economy

The integration of AI into your marketing activities needs to be active, and it will undoubtedly provide a competitive advantage. But we know technology does live in a vacuum; the thing that really gives you an edge is your people. So we’ve also mapped the human skills you’ll need to win in an AI powered world.  

We at Jellyfish invite you to use this framework in any way you see fit, whether that’s auditing your current skills and tech stack or planning what direction to take next, we want you to be deliberate in how you move forward and embrace AI while upskilling your teams. The disruption is here. Get the map you need to move faster and smarter.