Okay, let’s dive into an issue that seems to come up at least once or twice a week on my LinkedIn feed. It’s an issue that is almost certainly on your mind right now too.
The gist of what I tend to see online (and hear from founders who I work with) is along the lines of:
Is AI going to replace junior agency hires? If so, where will the seniors of tomorrow come from?!
The second part of this (which nearly always appears) implies that most people do believe that AI can indeed replace junior staff. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be talking about the second-order effects of such a change.
Honestly, I get it.
If I were someone leaving University right now, I’d be a little worried about my job prospects. Not because of my skills, but because of the perception of those skills.
The truth is that AI is changing things. We’ve already seen a concrete impact on copywriters and the demand for their services has dropped a lot in the last couple of years.
For agencies, many accept that change is happening. But we’re still in a period of transition where many of us are trying to figure out exactly what role AI will play in the future of our work.
So, let’s talk about the role that AI may play in your current and future hiring strategies.
The misplaced panic we’re seeing right now
The prevailing narrative is that AI will eliminate junior roles because it can handle the grunt work:
- Write the first draft of a blog post.
- Generate the keyword research.
- Build the content calendar.
All true.
But this misunderstands what junior roles actually do in agencies. They’re not just executing tasks, they’re learning judgement and taste. They’re developing the instinct to spot when something’s off, when a client isn’t saying what they actually mean, when a strategy looks good on paper but won’t work in practice.
Yes, AI can do impressive things. I’ve seen it generate accurate SEO forecasts, analyse a traffic drop and spot trends in masses of analytics data. But here’s what people miss: that forecast only worked because someone with years of experience spent time crafting the prompt, providing context about Google’s removal of certain parameters and knew enough to verify the output was realistic.
The AI didn’t replace the expert’s judgement. It accelerated the execution of work that required expertise to set up correctly.
Garbage in, garbage out – that’s where we’re at with AI.
The junior who can only execute a checklist will struggle when AI can execute it faster. But the junior who understands the strategic context behind why the checklist even exists becomes more valuable, not less.
Extending this, the junior who understands the strategic context of this checklist for this particular client at this particular time, becomes even more valuable.
What junior marketers actually do (when they’re good!)
There’s a difference between executing tasks and developing strategic thinking. “Doing the work” is where juniors learn to spot patterns, understand context and develop instinct.
I’m seeing this play out in real time with the agencies I work with at the moment.
Junior (and even mid-level) staff are missing the basics:
- Not being aware of the importance of renewal conversations with clients.
- Not preparing fully for catch up calls.
- Being late to calls or not tidying meeting rooms for real-life meetings.
These aren’t complex tasks. But they do require initiative, client awareness and follow-through. AI can’t do this for you. AI can’t force you to think differently.
The gap isn’t technical capability. It’s the ability to think critically about what you’re doing and why.
A good junior doesn’t just tick off the tasks. They ask: is this actually what the client needs? Is this approach working? What am I learning from the last three times I did this?
This has always been the case – these are critical skills to develop and have been for decades in digital marketing. But we’ve never had the threat of “something” that could potentially take a human’s place. So the competitor was another human.
Until now.
A junior who can only follow the process will find themselves competing with a tool that follows processes perfectly, every time, at scale.
Where agencies are actually struggling
The real problem isn’t that juniors can’t execute. It’s that they can’t think critically or adapt when the situation changes.
I spoke to a founder recently whose team was performing well on paper. Time logged, tasks completed, clients serviced. But when you looked closer, the quality of thinking wasn’t there. They were completing tasks without understanding why those tasks mattered or whether they were even the right tasks.
“I did the task” isn’t the same as “I understood what the client needed.”
This was also a struggle that I experienced at my own agency. One example being that some team members didn’t know why a service (such as digital PR) was actually valuable to a client – they just did it because they were told to.
These aren’t AI problems. These are thinking problems. Again, this hasn’t changed.
Here’s where it gets interesting. The agencies that are succeeding right now have juniors who use AI as a tool to do more strategic work. They’re not using it to avoid thinking. They’re using it to handle the repetitive stuff so they can focus on the work that requires judgement.
One agency I’m working with is teaching their team to use AI for things like content generation and data analysis, but the emphasis is on what to ask for and how to evaluate what comes back. The junior who knows how to prompt effectively and spot when the output is wrong is infinitely more valuable than the one who just copies and pastes whatever ChatGPT spits out.
What all of this means for hiring and developing people
If you’re hiring juniors right now, the qualities that matter have shifted.
Technical skills alone aren’t enough. They never were, but AI makes it even more obvious. You need curiosity, critical thinking and the ability to learn and adapt.
I’ve seen this play out in hiring decisions. One agency recently interviewed a candidate with 15 years of SEO experience. What stood out wasn’t just their technical knowledge. It was that they were articulate, could communicate well and had the judgement to manage client relationships. They could think on their feet. They immediately felt like someone who could be trusted in front of clients.
Compare that to the junior who’s been with you six months and still can’t manage the details that matter to clients. AI won’t solve for someone who isn’t detail-oriented or client-aware.
The risk of hiring people from other agencies who “lack essential skills” is that you’re just replicating the same problems. You need people who are actually doing the work at other agencies, not people who’ve learned to survive by looking busy.
The shift here is about what you’re screening for. Not “can you use this tool?” but “can you think strategically about when and why to use this tool?”
The same applies to AI tools – they all have a time and a place for adding value to a piece of work that you’re delivering to a client. They all have a time and a place for helping structure a conversation that you need to have with them.
But there are also plenty of times and places where they should NOT be allowed anywhere near client work.
If a junior can tell the difference – you may have a strong hire.
The uncomfortable truth (and what we can learn from SaaS)
AI will make it very obvious, very quickly, who can think and who can’t.
The juniors who rely on just “doing the doing” without developing strategic capability are in trouble. The agencies that build teams around execution without thinking are in trouble too.
Repetitive, “do for me” tasks are going to end up being a race to the bottom.
But here’s the opportunity: juniors who learn to use AI as a thinking partner, not a replacement for thinking, will leapfrog their peers.
I had a conversation recently where a founder pointed out that processes that once took weeks (generating ideas, launching a website, testing and validating concepts) can now be done in 24 hours with AI. But only if you know what to build and why.
We can actually look at the SaaS world (which is also going through a lot of change thanks to AI right now) for insight that is also relevant to agencies.
Any SaaS product’s defensibility now rests on unique data gathering, not the infrastructure itself. The same is true for marketing. Your defensibility isn’t in executing the tasks. It’s in knowing which tasks matter and why – to THAT particular client at THAT particular time.
Looking forward
If you look at your team (whether junior or senior) and see:
- A lack of critical thinking, especially under pressure.
- A lack of understanding of how agencies work (retention being a key element).
- A tendency to just follow steps rather than stop and ask why.
Then, frankly, they’re not going to survive the changes that we’re seeing. And there is a chance that your agency won’t either.
This is hard. It’s uncomfortable to accept that not everyone will make it through this shift.
But if you’re hiring for curiosity, critical thinking and a willingness to learn, not just task execution, your junior hires will be fine. In fact, they’ll be better positioned than ever, because AI removes the boring stuff and leaves the interesting, strategic work.
The juniors who thrive will be the ones who see AI as a tool that frees them up to think more, not less.
And finally – over the next few years, we’ll see juniors coming into the workplace as AI natives or AI first in their thinking – I wouldn’t bet against them adding LOTS of value to agencies who give them a chance.