In 2023, writing a solid article or ebook for innovative companies was about creating clear prose that included compelling data, addressed search intent, and ended with a compelling call to action.
Ah, the good old days.
In 2026, I am becoming a content engineer to continue to succeed in the hyper-competitive content marketing profession. I love writing and editing content "by hand," yet I am finding that I can still be a storyteller for the elements of content that require empathy, intuition and creativity. LLMs and collaborating with workflow-enabled AI systems to augment my skills.
AirOps is a SaaS provider that offers an AI-powered workflow engine for full-lifecycle content marketing. They define content engineering as "the practice of building systems that help teams create, update, reuse, and distribute content at scale without losing accuracy, consistency, or voice.
Content engineering strategies shift the perception of content pieces from being one-off projects to reusable assets that can deliver return on investment over time. Businesses can be more strategic and selective about the content they produce, and they can focus on maintaining their existing content that used to perform well by updating it with new data.
Many believe we’re entering an era where AI will take over the production of entry-level or average writing. To succeed, my peers and I will need to become content engineers who architect systems that make us productive, effective writers capable of producing top-tier content.
At a 2023 World Economic Forum event, Richard Baldwin, a professor from the Geneva Graduate Institute, was discussing the impact of artificial intelligence on global economies. Baldwin compared artificial intelligence to "wisdom in a can." He said, "AI won't take your job. It's somebody using AI that will take your job."
Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at NYU and the co-host of "The Pivot" podcast with Kara Swisher, put his own spin on Baldwin's statement. He said, "AI won't replace writers; writers who use AI will replace writers who don't."
Companies that implement content engineering strategies stop viewing their content pieces as one-off projects, and see them as repurposable assets that can deliver return on investment over time. Businesses can be more strategic and selective about the content they produce. They can focus on maintaining their existing content that used to perform well by updating it with new data.
Rand Fishkin is a world-renowned content marketing expert and the founder of Moz and SparkToro. He often talks about the flood of low-quality, unoriginal content that is churned out in the name of discoverability. In 2023, (there's that year again) he said AI-generated content is "the new floor" of content quality. He said AI is the prep cook and human writers are the chefs, ensuring that both long-form ‘entrées’ and snack-sized content are true feasts for readers’ minds—so they keep coming back for more.
Fishkin made those statements three years ago, but the best content outputs still happen when there is a "human in the loop" as the saying goes. A skilled writer who understands their audience, can empathize with the reader's search intent, and can enrich the AI-enhanced content that directly addresses the questions their customers typically ask.
In a kitchen, a master chef can finesse a meal prepared by a line cook to optimize the flavour before it is served to a restaurant patron. A content engineer's human inputs can add depth, warmth, and substance to marketing, sales enablement, and customer success assets.
Content writers, managers, and SEOs, have several evolving career paths they can choose as we go forward into the future.
Context librarians, who manage product, service, and company documentation as a source of truth and company memory to feed into the LLMs to generate content
Content and prompt engineers that extract information from LLMs, build workflows, and architect content systems
I believe my career will encompass many aspects of these roles as my content engineering skills and experience grow. A Superpath community peer shared a Harvard Business Review article recently that suggests that workflows are streamlining and automating many aspects of the heavy lifting of the content production lifecycle, Yet this intensifies other activities, like content audits, updates, and sourcing citations from subject matter experts. It makes knowledge workers’ days more demanding as we adapt to how content generation works in 2026 and beyond.
Many companies are so focused on producing new content that they let their existing content library get stale and irrelevant. Even when their writers create authoritative content with recent citations, many web searches end on Google, as many browsers get the information they are looking for from AI or LLM overviews. I know firsthand how easy it can be for a content marketing team to create a duplicate article to address a specific search intent priority and boost your keyword ranking. With content engineering tools and tactics, they could have just as easily updated the existing article with new citations, and updated subject matter expertise from industry, product, or domain experts.
Content engineers approach the full content lifecycle strategically, and treats each content asset as a component within a larger ecosystem. They recognize that each piece requires continuous updates and optimization to deliver valuable, timely insights to their target audience, and be discoverable by search, answer, and generative engines.
A content engineer thinks about content like a mechanic thinks about a car—it needs regular maintenance, not just a one-time build. Instead of only writing new articles, content engineers use data to decide what matters most.
They must decide whether they should,
Update an old popular page that's getting outdated?
Create something new to fill a gap in the content library?
Or personalize existing content so different customers see what's relevant to them?
Content engineers analyze which pages get the most visitors, where people drop off, and what information is missing. This means they might spend time improving one really good article that thousands of people read, instead of writing five new ones that nobody finds (or wants to). Content engineers build simple systems—like reports that track performance or checklists for quality—to make sure every piece of content actually helps the business grow. The goal is to work smarter: fix what's broken, create what's missing, and make sure the right message reaches the right person at the right time.
HubSpot's Loop Marketing playbook lays these processes out in the context of their AI marketing automation platforms. When I first watched keynote presentations on this from their INBOUND and GROW conferences, the speed, personalization, and automation of these processes seem hard to believe. Only tIme will tell how these AI platforms will evolve, and how the roles of marketing and growth professionals will evolve along with them.
Embracing the Content Engineering Reality
“As I’ve learned about content engineering, it’s clear that content professionals like me aren’t just facing the threat of AI replacing writers—we’re facing a new pace and scale of content lifecycles. Our choice is simple: learn how to wield AI as a brand intelligence system, or be left behind by those who do.
How is your business responding to this AI reality? Let’s explore how we can work together to harness AI to produce content at scale—without sacrificing the empathy, intuition, and creativity that define Cloudworker Digital. Fill out the form below and let's connect.