Once a brand pinned down funding, the next step was often to build out its team. That strategy isn’t completely disappearing, but it’s teetering. Today, brands raising money increasingly tout how lean they can stay.
Take Stories & Ink. The tattoo care brand recently raised roughly $1.8 million, and its founder Stu Jolley has pared its full-time team from around 12 people to about five as it prioritizes profitability. “This isn’t a growth-at-all-cost business. This is a much more methodical business,” he says. “We’re not going to overspend.”
While the consequences of artificial intelligence rippling through the workforce are highly uncertain, Jolley’s approach epitomizes the trim-down, scale-smarter, maximize-output-per-head philosophy philosophy taking hold across startups and large corporations. Boston Consulting Group estimates that 50% to 55% of jobs in the United States will be reshaped by AI in the next three years, and 10% to 15% will be replaced altogether.
As beauty companies of all sizes reconstitute their teams for the AI age, questions are emerging about which roles will become more integral and which may be eliminated. In the latest edition of our ongoing series posing questions relevant to indie beauty, we wanted to dive into those questions by asking 10 executive search experts, consultants and fractional executives the following: What job areas do you believe will see the most destruction, and where will job creation concentrate? What should brands be doing now to position their teams for an AI-driven future?
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ALYSE ZUNINO Founder and Creative Director, Eminence Brand Development What I’m seeing right now isn’t just teams getting smaller, it’s teams getting sharper. The roles that are most at risk are the ones built around execution without ownership. Junior marketing roles, content coordination and layers of project management are already being compressed. A lot of what used to require multiple people can now be supported by AI tools or handled by one strong operator.
Where I’m seeing growth is in roles that combine thinking and doing: people who can interpret data, make decisions and actually move something forward. Brand strategy, product development and performance marketing aren’t going away, but the expectation is higher. You need fewer people, but they need to be better.
AI is a powerful tool, but it still requires direction. It can accelerate execution, but it doesn’t replace judgment, taste or decision-making. That’s where the human layer becomes even more important.
What’s also changing is how brands structure their teams. Instead of building large internal departments early, they’re staying lean and pulling in specialized support when needed. When I’m working with brands right now, the focus is less on hiring for volume and more on hiring for versatility, people who can operate across functions and actually execute.
The brands that win here won’t be the ones with the biggest teams. They’ll be the ones with the most effective ones.
- Justine Chan Beauty Industry Consultant
Anything research related or transactional that doesn’t need as much judgment will be most likely to go away, so roles like junior creative positions—production, content creation, copy—and customer support. What will remain are roles that require judgment or taste-making. You cannot replace these easily: roles like brand strategy, creative direction, merch strategy, product development, regulatory, senior finance leader, senior supply chain leader, etc.
The biggest disruption will be in discovery and also consumers getting smarter faster. Brands will need to know how to be searchable and ranked on AI platforms like how it was on search platforms when Google first started.
With AI, consumers have a wealth of information at their fingertips and brands have a higher bar to remain at the forefront of this. For example, ingredient lists can be much more easily fed into any AI platform and researched. Are brands ready for this next level of educated customers?
I recommend brands become heavy AI users themselves and think through all the consumer use cases to prepare themselves for this new consumer: how to rank on platforms, how to AI-proof our product, if it makes sense to, how to establish a stand on use of AI in our content and communicate this to our community.
- VIRGINIE DUCHATELLE Founder and CEO, WeCurate
From what we see working closely with beauty brands, this isn’t a simple question of job loss versus job creation. It’s a deeper reallocation of value within organizations. The roles most exposed are those focused on execution without ownership of outcomes: operational marketing functions producing content without strategic oversight, descriptive analytics roles reporting without driving decisions and generalist commercial profiles lacking strong retail relationships or market expertise. These functions are not disappearing overnight, but their standalone value is declining as AI increasingly absorbs the execution layer.
At the same time, demand is concentrating around more condensed, high-impact profiles. We see three areas of acceleration:
– Hybrid strategic operators who can define direction and execute, using AI as a multiplier
– Market-specific retail experts with deep understanding of local dynamics and distribution requirements
– Brand builders with strong clarity on positioning, product-market fit and long-term consistency
AI can accelerate output, but it cannot replace focus or strategic coherence. The gap we observe today is not technological, but organizational. Brands should focus on three priorities:
– Moving from siloed functional teams to outcome-driven structures centered on revenue quality, retail performance and customer lifetime value
– Increasing seniority while reducing fragmentation: smaller teams, but more experienced and accountable
– Leveraging flexible expertise to test, validate and structure before scaling
- KATHERINE LEDESMA Founder, Atelier Skye
I think the real shift is less about AI simply replacing jobs and more about brands getting much clearer on which roles actually create leverage. You’re already seeing that with brands like Stories & Ink, where the focus is less on building headcount and more on getting higher output from a smaller, more focused team.
The areas most likely to get compressed are those built around coordination, formatting, reporting and passing information between team members. Smaller brands especially won’t be able to justify layers of work that can now be streamlined through tools.
Where I see staying power, and probably more investment, is in roles tied to judgment. Brand, product, creative and commercial leadership become more important in this environment, not less.
But those roles have to be much closer to the business. It’s not enough to lead brand in a vacuum. The people who become more valuable are those who can connect brand thinking to conversion, retention, product-market fit and profitability.
I also think job creation will concentrate in more hybrid roles. People who can think strategically, use AI fluently and still execute across channels will have an edge. The old separation between strategist, operator and creator is getting less rigid. Brands will increasingly want people who can move between those modes.
What brands should be doing now is redesigning teams around outcomes, not org charts. That means asking which roles truly drive growth, which tasks can be automated and where human judgment still matters most. The brands that will be in the strongest position are those building smaller, sharper teams with higher output per person, while investing in the kind of talent AI can’t replace easily: taste, decision-making, creative direction and commercial instinct.
- Rebecca Levin Partner, Martin Kartin & Co.
I love AI—I use it daily, both personally and professionally—but I think it’s important to frame it correctly: AI is a tool. It’s a powerful one, but it still requires a human behind it to ask the right questions, apply judgment and sense-check the output. It can absolutely make mistakes, and without strong human oversight, those mistakes can compound quickly.
In terms of job impact, I do think we’ll see the most disruption at the entry and executional level. Functions like copywriting, customer service, reporting and general administrative tasks are increasingly being automated or consolidated. In many cases, what used to be multiple roles may now be bundled into one, with AI acting as the force multiplier.
Where it gets more complex is at the strategic, critical thinking, storytelling and creative level. Using the Stories & Ink example—not to suggest this is what they’ve done, as I don’t have visibility into their internal decisions—but if this is the mindset brands adopt as they reduce headcount, it can become tricky. Staying lean is smart, but there’s a risk in overloading high-level operators with too many executional tasks simply because AI has “replaced” a role.
The people who thrive in startups are those who can zoom in and out, rolling up their sleeves while also contributing to bigger-picture thinking. That energy, curiosity and drive can’t be replicated by AI. If anything, overburdening those individuals with incremental tasks could dilute their real value rather than enhance it.
Looking ahead, I believe job creation will concentrate around people who can effectively operate at the intersection of strategy, creativity and AI fluency, those who know how to leverage these tools to maximize output without losing brand voice, originality or critical thinking.
There’s also an important responsibility here around the next generation of talent. If brands invest in AI education, it creates an opportunity to redefine what “entry-level” looks like. Instead of eliminating those roles entirely, companies can build a pipeline where early-career hires are trained in AI-first workflows, essentially making AI fluency the new entry point. That shift not only supports the evolving needs of the business, but also ensures we’re actively developing and protecting the next wave of talent rather than unintentionally cutting off access.
For brands, the opportunity isn’t just to cut headcount, it’s to rethink how teams are structured and empowered. That starts with investing in education. Teams need to be trained on how to use AI within their specific functions, not just given access to tools. I also think there’s a strong case for bringing in AI expertise early, whether that’s a dedicated hire or consultant, to help identify where AI can truly drive efficiency versus where human input is nonnegotiable.
Ultimately, the goal shouldn’t be to replace people, but to amplify the right ones. As brands scale, there will still be a need for new and different hires to reach the next level, and AI can help make those hires more effective from day one.
- Jessica Tully VP of Client Strategy, ForceBrands
Lean teams are not new to beauty. What is new is the pressure to be lean and excellent at the same time. Cutting headcount is one decision. Knowing which leadership you cannot afford to lose, and which roles need to evolve, is a different one entirely.
A year ago, most beauty brand leaders knew AI would change their teams. They just had not acted yet. ForceBrands' 2025 consumer brand research found only 11% had made any real changes. But today, AI has gotten good enough fast enough that waiting is no longer an option.
One trend stood out: Founders were three times more likely than CEOs to have already restructured their teams because of AI. This tracks with what we see every day in indie beauty. Founders feel the pressure first and move fast. Marketing showed the most movement, with one in three marketing leaders already changing how they plan and build their teams, although the pressure is spreading across functions.
The most immediate disruption is happening in creative and campaign production. Teams are no longer built around producing a fixed set of assets tied to a campaign calendar. With generative AI, brands can develop and test significantly more variations in less time, turning what used to be one campaign into multiple data-informed options. As a result, these roles are shifting away from pure execution toward curation, editing and brand oversight, with more output but not a proportional increase in headcount.
A similar shift is happening in consumer insights and trend forecasting, where AI is compressing research timelines and enabling real-time identification of trends, messaging angles and product opportunities. The work is moving from retrospective analysis to forward-looking decision support.
At the same time, execution-focused roles that are siloed by channel are starting to change shape. Functions like CRM, growth and digital are becoming more integrated with data and analytics, with a greater emphasis on full-funnel optimization rather than channel ownership.
AI is increasing both the speed and number of decisions teams can make, which raises the bar for talent. The individuals who will stand out are those who can operate across creative, data and technology and use AI to enhance how they work. The outcome is not just leaner teams, but a fundamental shift in how roles are defined and how work gets done.
But the other roles growing in demand are the ones no AI or data tool can replace. The roles proving most resilient right now are the ones that sit at the intersection of strategy, judgment and cross-functional alignment. These are the areas where data alone is not enough to make the call.
What we are consistently seeing is demand for senior leaders who can connect the dots across the business: heads of marketing, growth and brand who are not just channel experts, but true operators: people who can step back and ask if a retail launch is aligned with DTC strategy, if messaging ladders up across every touchpoint and what the full customer lifecycle actually looks like from acquisition through retention.
AI can surface insights and generate options, but it cannot prioritize in the context of a brand’s ambition, stage and constraints. That is where human judgment becomes nonnegotiable.
We are also seeing continued demand for leaders who own consumer understanding and brand voice at a high level. AI can analyze behavior, but it does not inherently understand nuance, cultural relevance or emotional connection. In beauty especially, where community, trust and identity are core to brand equity, that human layer is critical. Customers still want to feel seen, heard and part of something. AI can support that, but it cannot lead it.
At the same time, these roles are evolving. The expectation now is that senior leaders are AI fluent, even if they are not technical. They need to know how to leverage tools, pressure-test outputs and build teams that integrate AI into workflows, from prompt engineering within creative to dedicated AI or marketing operations leads driving efficiency.
Net net, you may need fewer people, but you still need the right leadership in place to ensure cohesion, clarity and strategic alignment. That is where clients are leaning in right now, hiring fewer, but hiring more thoughtfully around leaders who can orchestrate the system rather than just operate within it.
If I were to give advice to leaders to better position their brands for these new pressures, it would be to start rebuilding your marketing function around a single, accountable “decision engine” leader.
Right now, most beauty teams are still structured around execution—creative, CRM, paid and social—all operating in parallel. AI breaks that model. When content is infinite and data is instant, the bottleneck is no longer production. It is decision quality and alignment.
So, the move is not “add AI tools” or “trim headcount.” It is to put one senior operator in place—call it head of growth, marketing or revenue—who owns the full system:
- What gets made (creative and content)
- Why it gets made (insights and trend signals)
- Where it shows up (channels and spend)
- How it performs (data and iteration loop)
Because what I’m seeing is this: Brands that win are not the ones with the most AI. They are the ones where someone is actually orchestrating it end to end.
AI will give your team 10X more options. Without the right leadership, that just creates noise and slower decisions. With the right person in the seat, it becomes a compounding advantage.
Most founders I talk to are still trying to upgrade individual roles. The ones pulling ahead are rethinking who is accountable for the system as a whole and empowering that person to redesign the team around it. That’s the shift.
- Kim Walls AI Enterprise Architect for Beauty, Fractional Executive and Partner, Chameleon Collective
The most destruction will land on outdated ways of working. The jobs themselves aren’t necessarily going away. They’re being recreated entirely. I’ve spent the better part of the last two years building AI-driven operating systems for indie beauty brands, and what I see is every single role on the marketing and brand team being redefined. Not some of them. All of them.
A social media manager becomes a partnership specialist. A content writer becomes an editorial strategist. The humans have the freedom to move upstream, if they want it. Mindset determines the outcome. These shifts don’t just require fewer people or more people. They require different skills, different ways of assembling teams and systems that stop forcing talented people to spend their intelligence on work the infrastructure should handle.
But right now, this only works in high-trust environments. The people who thrive embrace AI without inhibition. They’re vulnerable about what they don’t know. They spend real time experimenting. They ask themselves, “How could I use AI to do what I’m doing right now?” not once a day, but all day. It pops into their heads more often than “This meeting could have been an email.” That kind of thinking can only take root where people feel safe saying “I don’t know how to do this yet.”
I think about this through Deborah Ancona’s X-Teams model from MIT: Teams aren’t fixed anymore. Specialists rotate in when the work needs them and move on when it shifts. What’s new is who’s on the team. Today you can build X-Teams that combine core full-time members, fractional specialists and AI agents, a behavioral economist, a semiotician, a cultural anthropologist that spar with you, push back on your thinking and surface context you didn’t know existed. AI agents aren’t just tools. They’re becoming co-workers. It changes everything.
And that shift is already reshaping where jobs concentrate. The gig economy is unstoppable. I see several generations that want to protect their freedom and find community wherever they work. Genuinely new roles are emerging: AI enterprise architects, brand systems leads, prompt strategists.
These aren’t IT roles bolted onto marketing. They’re strategic positions that didn’t exist two years ago, and many will be gig roles, not full-time seats. The talent that thrives is the talent that can parachute in, build something real and move on. But none of it works without strong full-time people and a brand operating system at the center. They’re the rocks, the foundation, the ones who carry the institutional knowledge and keep the brand steady while the specialists rotate around them.
Here’s where most leadership gets it wrong. They bolt on AI tools without building the data and process infrastructure to make them useful, and they skip the people work. At least half of my recent consulting is helping teams understand what AI can actually do for them, not the tools, but the possibilities. Without that, organizations just keep getting generic output, not because AI lacks capability, but because they skipped the onboarding.
The most innovative leaders I engage with see this immediately. They can see a completely new way of working in an hour-long meeting, then look at you unequivocally with, “This is a no-brainer.”
That’s what the leadership of tomorrow looks like. They have the experience and confidence to embrace change and the savvy to bring their teams with them. Leadership that is only focused on reducing overhead is at a sore disadvantage to leadership that both leverages AI and reallocates their team’s talent. It’s the difference between cutting costs and building something your competitors can’t catch.
So, what should brands do right now? Before your next hire and before any layoffs, think through your future org chart in the context of AI. Build your brand’s knowledge infrastructure first, so AI and your people can execute from a living strategic foundation. Not slide decks no one remembers where to find.
Create a high-trust culture where people feel safe experimenting. And stop expecting your team to figure out AI on their own. That’s exactly what fractional AI talent is for. The brands doing this now will have a structural advantage that’s very hard to reverse-engineer.
- Wendy Salisko Co-Founder, WADE
The execution and operations layers are the most important part of any brand right now, and this is where funded startups have a real advantage if they build smart. When you raise capital and build your team from the ground up, every role can be meaningful. Every person is close to the consumer, close to how the brand shows up in market. That proximity creates speed and accountability, which means the brand experience the consumer sees across channels is seamless and relevant.
Legacy beauty companies still do not have this, and they are restructuring quickly to try to unwind the complexity and proximity to the consumer. Most beauty giants have hierarchy layers that are siloed, internally focused and loaded with "visionary" leadership that is not actually operating or creating simplicity via granting decision authority and speed.
Because those teams are disconnected from each other and have weeks of red tape approvals, the consumer experience is fragmented, and it's dated. What someone sees on social does not match what they see in store. The messaging across retailers is inconsistent. The trend is gone. That is a structural problem, not a talent problem.
And the problem is getting worse because consumer pull is moving faster than most brand operating models are built to follow. Discovery is fragmenting. It is algorithm-driven, community-shaped and increasingly detached from the channels brands have historically controlled. A brand can have the right product and still lose the moment because their internal structure is not built to see the signal, interpret it and move on it fast enough. That is an operating model problem.
Where will the most job destruction happen? Reporting. Static content creation. Manual media buying. Anything where a person is doing a lift that AI can do faster and more consistently. The question is shifting from how many people do we need to do this to who on this team can think?
You still need humans with hands on the wheel for the big calls, the brand builds, the budget decisions, the strategic pivots. But the bottom tail of your portfolio, the manual updates, the repetitive operational lifts, those can run with AI in the background and a human checkpoint where the output needs to be audited.
Here is what it looks like when it works. You have one person who knows the category cold. They have AI running in the background picking up what is trending, what ingredients are spiking, what conversations are moving on Reddit or TikTok. Some of that is noise. But some of it is a real signal that consumer behavior is shifting in real time. And the person who has been in the category long enough knows the difference.
When it is real, they have the authority and decision autonomy to move, that day. They alert the team, update the product copy, make sure inventory is loaded, shift the ad spend to Amazon while the conversation is still hot. That whole thing happens in days, not quarters. That is what people plus AI is supposed to be. Not a dashboard nobody looks at, an operator who can read what is happening and has the authority to act on it fast.
A watch-out right now is how much everyone is celebrating achieving “lean” without asking who is doing the thinking. Cutting people is not a strategy. It is a result. And it is only a good result if you know what you are losing. We’ve seen it up close. The people decision cuts are being made by consultants and leadership who don't really understand where the real operator expertise and intel lies.
A title on paper does not give the proper context to how meaningful the work might be in the changing context of the market. Give it 18 months and then those decisions start to show. Your team is left with no one who truly knows your consumer. No one who can sit across from a retail buyer and read the room and their body language on where they're thinking of taking the category set. No one with enough context to catch when the AI got it wrong.
The other thing that does not get talked about enough is that AI amplifies whatever foundation you already have. A mediocre operator with good tools just produces more mediocre output faster. That is not a competitive advantage. That is a liability moving at speed.
And there is a real difference between AI that is helping you make decisions and AI that is making decisions for you. The second one is already producing brands that are optimizing for the algorithm instead of the consumer, chasing signals that look real in the data but are wrong in the market. The brands that get this are investing in the quality of the thinking first and the tools second.
So, what should brands be doing? Four things.
Stop backfilling junior roles by default. When someone leaves an execution heavy position, ask whether the gap is real or whether it is a workflow that AI can solve. The answer will not always be AI, but the question should always be asked.
Invest in developing your operators, not just buying tools. Handing someone a ChatGPT license is not a strategy. Teaching your people to think critically about what AI gives them, to integrate it into real decisions and to know when to override it, that is a capability you have to build on purpose.
Build your roles around external solves, not internal ones. Too many brands still design teams around internal needs: reporting up, coordinating across, managing workflows that only exist because the structure created them. The brands that move fastest are building roles that face outward where every person should be solving something the consumer or the market is asking for.
Build your team around decisions, not tasks where every person is close to a real decision. If someone's primary job is coordination or execution that a model can do, that role is at risk. If their job is making the right call, providing context and owning accountability, that role gets more valuable not less.
E.l.f. Beauty is a good example in the category: small team, disciplined, consistently outperforming brands with way more people. They got into AI tooling early in marketing and content and built a culture where output per person is the KPI.
Grüns is another one. They built roles that were closest to where and how they communicated with their consumer, then they signed incredible retail and distribution partnerships where it did not make sense to hire that talent in house and scaled to become one of the fastest exits in recent CPG history. That shows when you build right from the start, the growth you can obtain far out paces anything being done in market.
The most dangerous outcome of AI in early-stage brands is when founders stop trusting their own read on the market because a model told them something different. Operator instinct, knowing the consumer problem you are trying to solve, the pattern recognition you build from years of being in the room, making the call and living with the outcome, that is the asset most at risk right now.
AI is extraordinarily good at telling you what already happened, but it has no feel for what is about to. That gap is where experienced operators earn their place and it is where founders who outsource their instincts will feel the pain.
- AMY KAPOLNEK Fractional Executive and Growth Advisor, The Fwrd Group
From a brand and marketing perspective, the roles most at risk in an AI age are execution-heavy, repeatable functions, particularly across content, copywriting, reporting, customer service, junior-level performance marketing and increasingly areas like CRM/email execution, influencer sourcing, and basic SEO. Anything that relies on manual output, coordination or templated decision-making without a strong layer of strategy or interpretation is already being automated or significantly compressed. Even functions like campaign trafficking, asset versioning and A/B test setup are becoming more systematized and AI-assisted.
What’s emerging instead is a shift upward. Brands will rely more on strategic operators who can connect data, brand and business decisions as well as systems thinkers who can build and manage AI-enabled workflows. Creative leadership also becomes more important, especially in guiding taste, voice, storytelling and differentiation as content becomes easier to produce. At the same time, knowing how to use AI is becoming a critical skillset.
Most brands are approaching this shift incorrectly. They’re layering AI onto existing teams instead of rethinking how work gets done. The opportunity is to start with workflows to identify where AI can compress or eliminate steps, while building in human oversight and clear guardrails. From there, more senior teams are supported by AI and specialized external talent, with a focus shifting from headcount to output per person, which seems to be what Stories & Ink is doing.
- YIPING QIAN Founder and Fractional CFO, Above the Line Advisory
In my experience working with consumer brands of all sizes, the people who consistently win are the ones who show up curious, collaborative and genuinely invested in helping the team. That has not changed. What has changed is that curiosity now has to extend to AI.
I think of AI the same way I think about a really good collaborator. You bring your expertise, your judgment and your knowledge of the business. AI helps you organize, calculate and move faster. But you are the storyteller. You will pull it all together, apply real judgment, bring the story to the room and actually move people. You make it matter.
What Stu Jolley is doing at Stories & Ink is a great example of this in action. A leaner team does not mean a less capable one. It means every person is operating at their best, with AI as a collaborative tool filling in the gaps. For indie beauty brands, this is the moment to be small but mightier.
If you have a question you'd like Beauty Independent to ask executive search experts, consultants, fractional executives or anybody else, send it to [email protected].
