The AI stories worth your attention this fortnight are not model launches. They are structural shifts in how brands get found, how media gets bought, how people get paid and how regulators think. The market swings are a distraction. Here is what I would plan around.
Citations Are the New Rankings
Marketing Week’s latest round of stats flagged something I have been hearing from Sydney marketing leads for months: AI citations are starting to compete with traditional search visibility. When a buyer asks an AI tool for the best payroll software or a recommended recruitment agency, the answer names a handful of brands and links to a few sources. If you are not one of them, ranking third on a results page matters less than it used to.
This changes what good content looks like. Clear, factual, well-structured pages that other credible sites reference are more likely to be cited. Thin SEO filler is not. Most teams I speak to have no idea whether they are being cited at all, because nobody owns the question. It sits between SEO, content and PR, and falls through the gap.
Google’s Ad Fork
Marketing Week’s Week in Tech described Google’s ad business as hitting a critical fork in the road. The tension is simple. Google wants to keep selling ads against search while AI-generated answers reduce the number of clicks that ever reach those ads. How it resolves, through ads inside AI answers, more automated campaign formats or something else, will change how paid media is bought.
For Sydney teams, the practical concern is control. Automated campaign types already hand more decisions to the platform, and each step in that direction makes the traditional paid search specialist’s day job look different. Less bid tweaking, more judgment about creative inputs, first-party data, measurement and what to do when the platform’s reporting flatters itself.
I would not panic about this. I would, however, look at how your paid media roles are scoped. If the job description still reads like a list of manual optimisation tasks, you are hiring for 2019.
Pay Bands Meet AI Skills
Marketing Week also asked how new salary transparency legislation might affect marketing jobs, and its Career & Salary Survey 2027 podcast is worth a listen on the same theme. The collision is awkward. Transparency rules push employers towards published, defensible pay bands. Meanwhile, AI skills are commanding premiums that change faster than any annual salary review cycle.
I see the problem in briefs already. A hiring manager wants a content lead who is “strong with AI tools” and has budgeted last year’s band. The candidates who actually have that depth know their market value, and it is not last year’s number. Once bands become visible, the gap between what you advertise and what the market pays will be obvious to everyone, including your current staff.
There is also a definitional issue. “AI skills” is too vague to price. A person who can write a decent prompt and a person who can build a reliable workflow, test its outputs and explain its limits to a client are not the same hire. If you cannot describe the difference, you cannot set a band for it.
Schools Set the Tone
Education ministers are meeting to consider limits on screen time and generative AI in schools. It is easy to file this under education policy and move on. I would not. Schools are where public sentiment about AI gets tested first, and what ministers decide signals where regulation and community expectations are heading more broadly.
If governments are willing to set boundaries on how young people use generative AI, expect more scrutiny on how businesses use it in areas that touch customers, privacy and consent. Marketing teams using AI to generate content, personalise at scale or handle customer data should assume the rules will tighten, not loosen. Having a written internal policy on AI use is a sensible step now, not a response to a future problem.
Ignore the Stock Swings
You will have seen the headlines. Wall Street plunged as AI stocks tumbled, and the ASX was set to slide. Then AI stocks rebounded, and the ASX eyed gains. That is a week of noise. Share prices tell you what investors feel about valuations, not whether a tool is useful to your team on Monday morning.
I have watched hiring decisions get delayed by market anxiety before. It rarely helps. The businesses that held their nerve and kept building capability through earlier volatility were in better shape when conditions settled. Plan around the structural shifts above and let the traders worry about the daily moves.
My Take for 2026
Pick one of these four shifts and act on it before the year ends. Do not try to fix everything in December, because nothing good gets done in the last two weeks of the year anyway.
If you are in marketing, audit whether your brand is being cited in AI answers. Ask the major AI tools the questions your customers ask and note who gets named. It takes an afternoon and the results are usually sobering.
If you run paid media, review how those roles are scoped as Google’s ad model changes. Shift the emphasis from manual optimisation to measurement, creative strategy and data quality.
If you hire, get your pay bands and AI skill expectations in order before transparency rules force the conversation. Define what level of AI capability each role actually needs, and price it honestly.
Whichever you choose, keep hiring for judgment over tool familiarity. Tools change every quarter. The person who knows when an AI answer is wrong, when a platform recommendation is self-serving and when a shortcut will cost you later is the one worth paying for.
The future is bright, let’s go there together!
Thanks for reading,
Cheers Keiran
Big Wave Digital.
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At Big Wave Digital, Sydney’s leading digital, blockchain and technical recruitment agency, we have deep connections, experience and proven expertise, and the ability to achieve a win for all parties in the challenging recruiting process. We can connect to highly coveted digital and tech talent with the world’s best employers.
Keiran Hathorn is the CEO & Founder of Big Wave Digital. A Sydney based niche Digital, Blockchain & Technology recruitment company. Keiran leads a high performance, experienced recruitment team, assisting companies of all sizes secure the best talent.
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