"AI is flattening the base of the talent pyramid before agencies have figured out how to rebuild it. Session after session, leaders admitted that the work that once served as training wheels for juniors is evaporating. Reporting is auto-generated. Performance summaries write themselves. Pieces of planning now run in the background. The muscle memory that used to form by doing the repetitive stuff is no longer being built as intensely."
"The agency had three teams build the same media plan for a client. One team consisted of AI specialists who don't work on that client but are deeply trained on the agency's proprietary tools. Another team worked on a different brand for the same client. They understood the category and the client's expectations but had only light exposure to the agency's AI tools, leaning mostly on ChatGPT to speed things up. A third team built the plan without using AI at all."
"The result was telling: the AI specialists, despite having no brand context, produced a plan that closely resembled what the agency would normally deliver through its traditional process. The old-school team did too. The weakest work came from the middle - the group that had client familiarity but hadn't fully internalized how AI now fits into the workflow. It felt like a small but revealing snapshot of a broader talent paradox inside programmatic ad teams."
AI automation is removing repetitive entry-level tasks that historically trained junior agency staff. Routine reporting, performance summaries and parts of planning are now automated, reducing opportunities for on-the-job skill formation. An internal agency experiment compared three teams: AI specialists with deep tool training, brand-experienced staff using ChatGPT lightly, and non-AI planners. AI specialists and non-AI planners produced strong plans; the middle group underperformed. The findings show that weak integration of AI into workflows can erode team value. Agencies must restructure hiring, training and workflows so teams combine brand context with deep, practiced fluency in proprietary AI tools.
Read at Digiday
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]