Columnist Alex Lamaro-McCrindle, Digital Lead, Miroma Founders Network, looks at the framing of AI, and whether we view it through a lens of threat, or opportunity…

I've recently developed a bit of an addiction. I'm starting to understand how people get pulled into things like TikTok, except mine is Claude. I find myself thinking about almost everything I do during the day and whether I can automate it or just remove some of the friction between me and getting it done.

One of those jobs was a weekly report document. What normally takes about two hours took about ten minutes. The data itself isn't the hard part. It's already structured and visible in our dashboards. What currently eats the time is taking that data, dropping it into client templates, or cutting it into different views for further analysis.

A few people on the team were impressed. Then one of our grads said, half joking, "you're replacing my job." I didn't think too much of it in the moment, but I found myself pondering on it that evening. The next day, his line manager made a similar comment when I showed him what I'd built. "Bear with me on this," I said, "but I've got a potential positive spin on how we could look at this."

I want to be upfront that I haven't made my mind up on it. It's not a hill I'm planting a flag on. But it's an idea I find genuinely interesting, and one I'm going to test properly with our grads over the next few months, because I think it points somewhere more useful than the conversation we usually have about AI and junior careers.

That conversation tends to be framed as a threat. Entry level roles are supposedly the most exposed, and it's usually pointed at the jobs they spend most of their time doing. I think there's a more interesting thought sitting just behind this. Less about what AI can now do instead of a grad, and more about what a grad might now be able to do instead.

Two questions worth asking

What I said to the line manager was "How much time do you think your team spends on reporting each week? And how much time do you think they spend building campaigns?" His answer, "quite a lot".

Then I asked the second question, which was really the point I wanted to make. "After they've built the same report or campaign a few times, how much do you think they're still learning from it?"

"Probably not a lot," was his response. Which is probably right. The first time you build a report, you're learning the platforms, how to read the data, how to use Excel, how to make the slides not look shit, and then how to talk about what's going on. The tenth time, you're mostly just doing it. You're not thinking. You're executing.

That's not a criticism. It's just what repetitive work becomes once the repetition has done its job. The problem is that a lot of a grad's week is still made up of that kind of task, long after it's stopped teaching them anything.

What repetition is actually for

There's a fair counterargument, and I don't want to skip past it. Repetition is how you build attention to detail. It's how patterns start to stick, how you develop a feel for when something looks off. A lot of what separates a good account handler from a great one is exactly that kind of instinct.

So the question isn't whether repetition builds skill. It clearly does. The question is whether it's the only way to build it.

Because there's a difference between checking your own manual work and checking a model's output. Checking your own work is mostly about catching mistakes you made. Checking a model's output is about something closer to judgment. 

That's arguably a harder skill than the one it's replacing, not an easier one. It just needs to be taught deliberately, rather than assumed to happen automatically the way it did when the manual reps were the only option.

Breaking the fixed order

So with the potential to free up time, what opportunities does this open for junior team members? The opportunity to develop. Normally this happens in a fairly fixed order. An exec spends a year or two doing the manual work. Eventually they get promoted to manager, and that promotion is partly what buys them the time to start doing the planning and the strategic thinking, because now there's an exec doing the reporting. The strategic exposure has always been tied to the title, not really to readiness.

If we can take a chunk of that manual work off the table at the exec level, you don't need to wait for the promotion to create the time. The exposure can start while someone's still an exec.

Most of us already have a formal mechanism for this kind of development; PDPs. We all write goals, and no matter how disciplined we are, it doesn't always take priority because the plan competes with a week that's already full.

Done right, using AI can allow us to finally have the room to focus on the stuff we are tempted to push back. If a grad's development plan says they want more exposure to planning and strategy, that's only achievable if they have time. Freeing up time is what makes it more realistic to spend time on.

The responsibility that comes with it

I said at the start I haven't made my mind up on this. But I'm going to run it properly with our grads over the next few months. I've explained this way of thinking to the team, and they seem excited about the chance to get more involved in the strategic work and develop faster than they might otherwise. That's what I genuinely see for them. We're going to work through this together, and make sure they're involved in building it with me, not just having it done to them.

But there is another sentiment I really want to leave you with. There's a responsibility that comes with this as senior members of the team. If we're the ones building the processes that take on this work, we're also the ones with enough experience to know how this can genuinely work in their favour, not just tell them it will. Left unsaid, the only story they hear is the one already circulating everywhere else, and that one is mostly about being replaced. That's not a story I think is accurate, or one I'm willing to let everyone believe.