AI is coming for entry-level jobs

Are we sleep-walking into a leadership deficit in 10-15 years time?

We’re using AI to automate entry-level work to stay competitive. In 10 to 15 years, we’ll be fighting over a talent pool we all helped destroy.

Happy Monday everyone. Why not stick on some Joy Division and settle in for an uplifting article…

The efficiency case for AI in brands isn't debatable anymore. Automate repetitive work, reduce headcount, protect margin. The tools work, the ROI is clear, and your competitors aren't waiting for permission.

So brands will do this. They’re already doing it.

What nobody’s pricing in is the leadership deficit we’re sleepwalking into.

The tasks AI automates best sit disproportionately in entry-level roles. Weekly trade packs, routine reporting, first-pass copy. The structured, repeatable work that happens to be where people learn how brands actually operate.

Automate those tasks away and you don’t just trim payroll. You collapse the apprenticeship. And without the apprenticeship, you don’t get the next generation of leaders who know what good looks like and can actually scrutinise and manage the machines.

The pipeline breaks quietly

The hypothesis is simple.

If the number of entry-level roles shrink. Hiring slows. The juniors you do bring in spend their time monitoring AI outputs instead of doing the actual work. They learn to approve, not to judge. To trust the model because they’ve never lived through what happens when the model is subtly, expensively wrong.

Give it 10 to 15 years and today’s assistants should be your managers. Today’s coordinators should be your directors. Instead you’re staring at a gap.

A shortage of people who can interrogate what the automation is doing. Who’ve built the pattern recognition and muscle memory that only comes from years of reps. Who know how the business works when the systems don’t agree and the customer does something annoying right on the cutoff.

That knowledge doesn’t come from courses or observing. It’s earned through doing the work, making mistakes, and gradually building an “in the bones” understanding.

With AI, we’re doing away with the opportunities to develop knowledge in the next generation of brand leaders.

The competitive failure mode

Here’s where it gets worse. Every brand faces the same pressure to automate. So every brand will. And every brand will end up competing for the same tiny pool of people who actually came up doing the work.

Costs spike. Churn accelerates. You lean harder on consultants and external hires because the institutional knowledge isn’t sitting inside the business anymore.

Worse, you get slower and more fragile. You’ve got excellent tools and not enough people who can tell you when the tools are lying. When the forecast is off, the copy doesn’t sound like your brand, or the operational decision will create problems three steps downstream.

The more you automate, the more you need humans with deep context to scrutinise what you automated. But those humans don’t magically appear. They’re grown through years of doing the work you just removed from the business.

We’re trading short-term efficiency for long-term fragility, and we’re all doing it at the same time.

We’re not prepared for this

The brutal part is that brands will make the rational choice at every stage. Automate or fall behind. The market punishes hesitation faster than it punishes deferred talent problems.

But rational individual decisions can still create collective problems. And we’re sleepwalking into one.

In 10 to 15 years, we’ll have a generation of “leaders” who’ve never done the work they’re leading. Who can’t sense-check AI outputs because they never built the judgement. Who’ve only ever approved, never created.

Now the optimists will say “well the AI will be so good in 10 years that it’ll paper over the gaps in individual understanding”. Totally fair, but doesn’t that feel pretty bleak for the next generation of school, college or university leavers? Is that really the extent of our ambition?

Without new pathways and different approaches, we’ll break the talent market.

The leadership deficit is coming. Not because anyone intended it, but because nobody stopped to ask what happens when an entire industry automates away its training ground at the same time.

If we don’t intervene now - if brands don’t deliberately rebuild pathways for early-stage talent, create new apprenticeships, make space for real practice and feedback - we’ll get the efficiency today and the crisis tomorrow.

Our small attempt at not just being part of the problem

AI is moving too fast to navigate all the implications alone, and there’s nowhere dedicated to retail brands solving the adaptation problem together.

Whether that’s practical use of the tools, to managing the org design shifts it’s prompting.

So I’ve created an invite-only community where brand leaders and operators learn, share and build AI-era capabilities as a peer group.

We're deliberately mixing senior leaders with ambitious junior talent. Systems admins with merch managers, ops specialists with analysts. Different experience levels, same challenge: learning to work with AI without losing the fundamentals that made us good at this in the first place.

If you’re interested then apply at Operator Experience.