Illustration of a manager holding a brief case and shaking hands with an android as a new recruit. The human employee that the android replaced is walking away with hunched shoulders, looking downcast as he carries the items he has cleared from his desk in a cardboard box.

Short-sighted: Industries that replace junior employees with AI could lose insights as well as future leaders

Working across both academia and industry, I get to see marketing from two sides.

I work with practising marketers and with students who have made a conscious decision to build a career in this profession. Lately, I have noticed something change in the questions those students ask me.

It used to be that students wanted to know how to stand out in a competitive marketplace. Increasingly, they are asking whether there is a role, or a way in, for them at all.

What strikes me is that this is not a talent problem. The students and graduates I meet are not short of ability or ambition. They are short of doors opening to them. The anxiety I hear is not, "can I do this?" It is, "will anybody let me try?"

A particular idea sits behind that anxiety: that one senior marketer with the right tools can now do the work of three, so companies can do without junior members of staff.

I want to be clear that I am not anti-AI. There is a great deal that AI can do. I use it in my own teaching. But I have spoken to marketers who have openly told me they have replaced junior roles with AI, and that should give us pause for thought.

The question I raise is, if we get AI to do the work juniors do today, who becomes the next layer of senior employees tomorrow? That is a significant pipeline problem, and it reframes the whole debate.

This is not about being kind to young people. It is a growth problem. An industry that stops growing its own people is slowly forfeiting its future supply of senior talent.

It does not help that I keep seeing entry roles advertised with a demand for three years of experience, which by definition is not an entry role at all.

Can AI be as effective as a human employee?

Replacing junior employees with AI also overlooks what young talent brings to the table (and I am wary of the usual platitudes here).

These younger workers have a native fluency with AI and very little fear of the tools. They also have a proximity to emerging culture, platforms, and audiences that seniority alone does not buy. They tend to ask why we do things the way we do, which is uncomfortable and valuable in equal measure.

So, if AI now does the first drafts and the early research, what should a young marketer actually be learning?

The honest answer is that the ground has shifted towards human judgement. One of the most underrated skills in marketing is empathy, and by that I mean a skill, not a trait.

As marketers, we have to think and feel like people who are not ourselves, such as customers and audiences whose lives may look nothing like our own. That is a skill that can be taught and developed.

Add critical thinking and the ability to sit with ambiguity – because the honest answer to most marketing questions is "it depends" – and you have the work that AI cannot do. That is exactly what we should be helping young marketers build.

This is why mentorship matters, and why its quiet erosion worries me.

There are a lot of assumptions about what mentoring is. It does not have to be a formal scheme. It can be short, project-based, peer-to-peer or bottom up.

In precarious times it is human nature to look inward. Those on the career ladder and unlikely to lower it for others when they are worried about their own position upon it. But the cost of that caution does not show up on any one company's accounts. It lands on the whole profession, years later.

So, my message to employers is simple. And it is one that is relevant across individual companies and industries, but is particularly pertinent for marketing at present.

Stop demanding the finished article, and invest in the work in progress. Lower the ladder for those who are following in your footsteps. If there is no ladder left, build a new one. Just do not pull it up behind you.

Further reading:

Five strategies to succeed during the B2B sales revolution

Who will benefit from AI and who will lose out?

How to close the AI skills gap in your organisation

Do you need an AI teammate?

 

Laura Chamberlain is Professor of Marketing and founder of the professional development and career strategy agency Think Talk Thrive. She teaches Marketing on the Executive MBA, Executive MBA (London), and Part-time MBA (London Accelerator), as well as Branding and Marketing Communications on the MSc Marketing and Strategy.

She is also the course lead for the BSc Business and Management with Marketing and is actively looking to work with organisations on employability and the future of the marketing industry..

Learn more about adapting to AI on the School's two-day Executive Education course AI Leadership programme at WBS London at The Shard.

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