You don’t need a dramatic prediction about the death of work to see the problem. If AI helps you get more done with a smaller team, cutting payroll can be a perfectly sensible decision.
The trouble arrives a few years later, when you’re hiring experienced people after giving fewer juniors the chance to learn the job.
Jordan Stachini sees the incentive clearly in a creative agency. If AI can generate ideas quickly, the obvious cost-cutting question is whether the agency still needs ten junior creatives.
The best people she’s worked with became good through trial and error, moving from junior roles towards becoming middleweight designers, lead designers and creative directors.
“How do you then get more senior creatives coming through if you’re stopping it right at the start?” she asks.
If you remove more of the work people used to learn on, you need another way to build the experience you’ll still be hiring for later. 👇🏻
Junior work is already changing
Nick Holzherr says companies are already changing who they employ. “They’re not hiring junior marketing people anymore,” he says. “They are hiring more senior people that can use AI. So they just need fewer people.”
The appeal is obvious: an experienced marketer who knows how to use AI needs less supervision and is better placed to judge what AI produces. You get useful work sooner without paying to teach several people from scratch.
The problem can also appear when the job survives. Konstantin Klyagin’s software agencies use AI to take boring work away from existing developers and leave them extra time for more interesting work. He doesn’t frame it as a way to replace staff.
Konstantin says building larger, reliable software still requires somebody who understands architecture, infrastructure and how the system fits together. If AI removes some of the repetition that helped people develop that knowledge, your company must decide how a junior developer is going to learn it.
The boring work was teaching you something
Nobody needs to spend years copying numbers between spreadsheets because boredom supposedly builds character. Some tasks deserve to disappear.
Early work also puts somebody in front of hundreds of small decisions. A junior writer starts noticing why one draft is weak. Somebody handling clients learns to recognise the moment confidence begins to slip. Those lessons add up before the person can fully explain what they’ve learnt.
Anjeanette Carter argues that AI is far more useful when somebody can combine it with knowledge of the subject. Without that, a junior can get a better first draft before they understand why it’s good or recognise when it’s poor. They then learn by reviewing the work and seeing how it performs for a real client or user.
You used to learn by overhearing
Michael Buckworth saw what happened to trainee lawyers who worked remotely during the pandemic. Junior lawyers struggled, stopped developing and produced poorer work. He says less contact with senior lawyers put pandemic trainees at a disadvantage. He called it the loss of “osmosis”: hearing senior people speak to clients and listening to conversations around the team.
Nick Telson-Sillett noticed the same mechanism in sales: junior employees sitting nearby picked up his intonation and small techniques simply by hearing his calls. Recordings preserve the call, but not all of that everyday exposure.
With AI handling more of the practice work, a remote junior will spend less time around experienced colleagues. If your team is remote, shared documents and a weekly call won’t recreate all the learning that once happened around experienced people.
The senior hire is the easier choice
Gavin Bell’s first hire shows what close apprenticeship can produce. Keir arrived raw. They sat side by side every day handling clients, giving Gavin plenty of chances to explain his approach and correct the work as it happened. Keir developed through the experience.
Gavin now has the money to hire senior people who can work independently sooner. Teaching another inexperienced employee would cost time and attention that the business no longer has to spend in the same way.
There’s nothing hypocritical in that decision. The same choice becomes more attractive once you can afford experienced people. The problem grows when companies across the market make the same decision and give fewer juniors the years of work needed to become the senior hire everyone wants.
AI can help rebuild the practice
Ben Tasker found a useful role for AI inside training: using it for roleplay so somebody can build “muscle memory” and learn common cues before they face a live client.
AI can give juniors more chances to practise when the job itself gives them fewer. They can rehearse a difficult conversation, try another response and discuss what happened with an experienced colleague. Asking AI for a finished answer teaches less than requiring the person to choose an approach and explain it.
That’s why AI makes practice cheaper and easier to repeat. But experienced colleagues still define what good looks like.
Training becomes somebody’s job
Jordan already treats this as a cost the company has to absorb. She hires 19-year-old apprentices, pays them a professional wage and thinks of it as a bigger investment because the employer has an obligation to teach, mentor and support them.
That matters more as accidental training disappears. Universities can prepare people for work, but the judgement specific to your company has to grow inside the business. If you use AI and run a distributed team, juniors already get less of that everyday practice.
Look at the experience disappearing from a role as AI takes over more tasks. Remove the genuine waste. Before it goes, check whether any of that work was also giving people useful practice.
Once you know what still matters, put it back into the role on purpose. Give a junior real responsibility with AI assistance and keep them close to the consequences. Let them hear experienced colleagues handle clients before you expect them to lead those conversations themselves.
AI can help you cut entry-level jobs and reduce how much junior work you need today. Five years from now, you’ll still be looking for experienced people. The senior hire you want then has to learn somewhere first.
Good point. The senior hire looks cheaper until you notice where that person learned the job. If AI eats the practice work, somebody has to put deliberate training back in.
Companies that invest in people will have a competitive edge and loyalty.