[fooza]

I think this sector is now a embodied in sales/marketing. It's reasonable to expect from some one to become a productive salesperson after a few months. This professional will have many options from online marketing through mall cart sales to selling cloud services to corporations

[dv_dt]

What a nightmare vision that gives me; Automation and lucky people who randomly chose the right skillset work, producing more and more of the core economy, and the rest of the meatbags are left selling stuff to each other?

What happens when many business services are selected from automated markets... I guess we all sell custom hand-made widgets to each other?

[emodendroket]

You need a particular kind of personality to do well in sales and most people don't have it. Most sales people end up dropping out.

[ethbro]

Anything that can be eaten by software will be eaten by sufficiently advance software eventually.

I can't think of any substantial value-adds from sales/marketing in the future to necessitate adding jobs there. High value (e.g. Apple) is currating a brand and most value is added at the top (average Genius salary looks around $45k [1]). Low value (e.g. Android OEMs) doesn't have the profit margins to support a larger human-sales/marketing team. And commodity (e.g. McDonald's) is high-level strategic branding with essentially no low level value add.

[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Apple-Mac-Genius-Salaries-E...