What happens to junior roles in agencies when AI does the first draft?
Summary: AI doing a junior's first draft removes the space where they used to learn their craft. Our view: redesign the workflow so juniors get that space back in a different form. It works because of what juniors already bring: adaptability, and comfort with new tools that's harder to find once you've done a job one way for years.
Date: 23.09.2026
Author: Emma Wharton Love
Read length: 4 minutes
Spark AI is the AI performance partner that builds organisation-wide AI capability for creative agencies and brand teams. We take ambitious teams from fragmented experimentation to AI embedded across their people, processes and systems ā so it delivers real commercial impact.
Why is the pressure landing on junior roles?
The tasks agencies give juniors ā research, data pulls, first drafts, meeting notes ā are the tasks AI is best at. They're also how juniors build judgement, through repetition and correction. Take the tasks away without changing anything else, and you take away the space where those skills are learned.
Creative agency headcount is down 14.3% and vacancies down 40.8%, hitting young staff hardest (IPA Agency Census, Feb 2026). Early-career workers in AI-exposed roles sit around 19% below where they'd otherwise be, driven mainly by reduced hiring (Stanford Digital Economy Lab, Aug 2026). The 4A's and D&AD have both warned this risks hollowing out the pipeline that develops judgement in the first place (4A's, June 2026; D&AD, The Cost of the Shortcut, Aug 2026).
What does the junior role become?
There's a difference between AI doing one step faster and AI redesigning the workflow, and it matters a lot for juniors.
Speeding up one step keeps the workflow the same shape ā the same handoffs, just faster. That's a problem for juniors, because those steps were their job.
Redesigning the workflow is different. Before AI, work moved one step at a time ā research, then draft, then refine, each done by someone different. AI can compress and configure several of those steps together, so one person moves through all of them at once. The workflow changes shape, rather than just moving faster.
That redesign is itself a job worth having. Deciding how the steps combine, what AI does at each point, and where a person still needs to check, is real ownership. Give a junior that role ā responsibility for the workflow itself, alongside the output it produces. Early findings from our Spark report found that 9% of agencies have done this redesign so far, which is the opportunity.
AI can help build the judgement that role needs, too. Rob Crow, one of our Creative Coaches, points out that AI can make thinking easier to examine ā ask it to explain the features of a style or the effect of a technique, and you get the vocabulary to study the work yourself and form an opinion.
Juniors bring real value to this shift. Growing up with AI and digital tools gives them the adaptability and appetite to experiment that a redesigned workflow needs. They also haven't spent years doing the job one particular way, which means they can often spot possibilities in a reconfigured workflow that's harder to see once a habit is set. That's a real asset for the agency running the redesign, and part of why we think this shift is worth making. Accountancy shows the shape of it: bookkeeping became trivial over a century of automation, and the profession moved up into advisory work.
What has to change for senior people?
Co-creation replaces delegation. The senior person stays involved while the decisions get made, from the brief through the build. The junior drives the first build with AI, and the senior explains why they'd change something. What's decided out loud gets written down as a brief or a reusable AI instruction.
What does this do to team structure?
Most agencies are moving the opposite way: wider spans, fewer managers. Gallup puts the average span of control at 12.1 direct reports, up from 10.9 a year ago. Korn Ferry found 41% of organisations removed a management layer in the past year. Gartner predicts a fifth will use AI to halve middle management by the end of 2026. The assumption behind this is that AI lets one manager oversee more people.
Co-creation breaks that assumption. A senior person can properly co-create with five or six juniors at a time, sitting with each one while the important decisions get made. They can't do that for twelve. The more agencies use AI to widen spans, the less room each junior actually gets to learn from someone who knows more than they do.
Our view: agencies that want this model working need smaller teams under each senior person. That's a restructuring move, grouping people so senior time stretches further per junior, rather than a headcount cut. Read alongside the accountancy example, the same people end up doing work that's moved up, organised into smaller, closer-knit teams.
Start with one workflow. Pair a junior with a senior, redesign it end to end with AI, and give the junior ownership of running it. Focus on spans before you touch headcount.
Frequently asked questions
How do you tell if you're redesigning the workflow, or just using AI to go faster?
If the handoffs stay the same and only the speed changes, that's the old process with AI bolted on. A real redesign changes who touches the work and how many steps happen in one sitting.
How can we find out about more insights like this?
In November, we will be launching our Autumn 2026 Spark Report, that will have a chapter detailing this further. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay informed about its release.
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