There is a practical reason advertising agencies are using more AI. Clients want work to be done faster while budgets are under pressure. The volume keeps growing, and agencies are being asked to do more with less. Automation is an obvious response to trying to find efficiencies.
When timelines tighten and teams are stretched, the temptation might be to use whatever helps you get the work out. The risk with this is that speed starts driving how the agency works, rather than simply helping it work better.
Work can be turned around much faster but when rushed in this way it often feels soulless. The system may reward volume when people are under pressure to deliver, but advertising still depends on individuals who are able to make good judgement calls about what will and will not connect and resonate with audiences.
That is where the AI conversation becomes nuanced. Junior roles have traditionally included work that can now be automated. Some of those human tasks will disappear, and it would be unrealistic to pretend otherwise. The industry will change, as will job descriptions.
The question then becomes: What else will we remove when we take those junior tasks away?
Judgement has to be built somewhere
People learn judgement through real briefs and working under pressure with someone more experienced asking why they made a particular recommendation. They learn when an idea is challenged and they have to explain the thinking behind it. They learn by taking responsibility for their work and seeing what happens when it meets the real world.
There is value in completing a task and understanding why one route worked while another did not. If juniors no longer get enough exposure to that process, we may well solve a capacity problem now only to create a capability problem later.
What happens to the people who will replace our agency generation?
Every senior person in an agency learned by doing work that, at the time, may have looked routine to their seniors. If we remove that learning layer we need to be deliberate about what takes its place. Otherwise, we may only discover the gap when the industry needs experienced people and too few are coming up through the ranks.
If we lose the talent, we lose the translators
Our work in advertising depends heavily on cultural translation. AI models work from information that has already been captured and encoded. Humans bring nuance that often sits outside those formal datasets. Culture moves in ways that have not necessarily been captured in data yet. If we lose the talent, we lose some of those translators.
This is especially important in Africa. This continent has the world’s youngest population – a median age of just 19. We all know youth unemployment remains unsustainably high, yet the young people most affected by changes to entry-level work are also often among the most fluent users of AI. They already have their hands on tools the industry is still figuring out how to use.
There is a commercial consequence here. The young people we discuss as future employees are also the customers brands expect to serve in years to come. If large numbers of them struggle to participate economically, it affects the markets those brands rely on.
Working with AI
No one is suggesting agencies recreate the structures that existed before AI, or keep junior tasks simply because that is how people used to enter the industry. Some of that work will disappear. What we need to think about is where juniors fit in as the agency model changes.
They should be working alongside AI from the beginning. Agencies should let the technology accelerate the work while young people build the judgement and cultural fluency the industry still needs. Senior oversight becomes even more important because someone still has to help young people understand why the work connects with an audience or why it does not.
AI should be treated as infrastructure, and education must keep pace with change. Young people need to know how to use AI well while also learning how to research properly and how to take ownership of their own recommendations.
There will be disruption, with some jobs disappearing and agencies having to reshape. Young people have agency in this too and will play their own part in shaping a changing industry. But the industry has a choice about the structures it builds around them.
Somewhere, today, a young person is listing their qualifications in a reply thread, hoping a stranger notices. I keep thinking about that image because it brings this debate back to something very human. We should be using AI to build a better advertising industry without becoming better at excluding those who are supposed to inherit it.
