BY MARTY FISHER
Let’s all raise a glass. We’ve finally automated the entry-level employee.
The junior creative, the intern, the bright-eyed Asper or RRC graduate who still thinks “fast-paced environment” sounds exciting. It’s a glorious time for the P&L.
At my firm, The Show and Tell Agency, we can now generate a month’s worth of social media captions, a dozen blog post outlines and a shockingly competent mood board before our first cup of Joe goes cold.
Why hire a 22-year-old to do entry-level work when AI can do it faster, cheaper and without asking for time off for a music festival?
This new “employee” is a miracle. It doesn’t need benefits. It doesn’t get hungover. It doesn’t complain about the client’s feedback. It just produces. It can analyze market trends, write passable (if slightly soulless) scripts and even generate background music for a sizzle reel.
The junior is dead.
And AI is the killer.
There’s just one problem.
We hired this perfect, tireless worker, and then we asked it for an idea. It gave us a list. We asked it if the list was good. It said, “Based on my data, these are highly optimized.”
Here’s the hitch in our glorious, automated future: Our new AI intern can be confidently and abjectly
wrong — and it’s hard to tell when it’s incorrect!
It will create an image of a person with six fingers and present it as the pinnacle of design. It will write copy that is grammatically perfect and emotionally vacant. It cannot tell good work from bad. It has no taste. It has no instinct. It has zero ideas. It can show you 1,000 variations, but it can’t tell you which one actually matters.
And this is why the “Death of the Junior” isn’t a eulogy; it’s a rebrand.
We’re not going to hire people to just do the grunt work. We’re hiring them to direct it.
The real value isn’t a kid who knows the basics of Photoshop. The tangible value is the 23-year-old critical thinker who spots the AI’s “sixth finger” and prompts the fix. It’s the intern who is platform agnostic — she doesn’t care if the idea lives as a TikTok video, a 30-second spot, or a billboard, as long as it’s great and compelling.
We need to hire young staff who are curious about how to use AI to help them do more and better work.
We need people who see AI not as their replacement, but as the world’s most powerful, and stupidest, assistant.
We need them to have the judgment to know what to show the client and the confidence to tell the machine it’s wrong. (#seewhatididthere?)
Agencies that replace their entire junior pool with a ChatGPT subscription are in for a rude awakening. They are busy optimizing today’s payroll while cheerfully torching their 10-year plan.
Because here’s the real question: If we don’t hire and train young people, who is going to do the work of today’s senior employees in 10 years?
You can’t start a career in the middle. If we don’t hire and train young humans now — train them in taste, in strategy, in judgment, in the messy, tension-filled business of ideas — we will have a generation of “senior” leaders who only know how to approve what a machine generates.
The junior isn’t dead.
They just got a promotion.
They’ve gone from being the hands to being the brains. And frankly, we need their young, imaginative, plastic minds more than ever.
