Will AI Make It Harder To Get Your First Agency Job?
A first agency job was never mainly about the output. It was an apprenticeship disguised as a workload, and the workload is the part that automated first.
Resizes, alternate headlines, competitor decks, first-pass storyboards, transcript summaries. None of it was glamorous and all of it was load-bearing, because doing it badly a hundred times under someone's supervision is how judgement was acquired.
What happens to the first agency job when the tasks go
The IPA's 2025 census reported that 88.3 per cent of agencies say AI has considerably affected how they work, and that under-25 headcount fell 19.2 per cent year on year. Those two numbers sit next to each other uncomfortably, and it would be convenient to read one as causing the other.
The honest position is that the census establishes both facts and not the link between them. Agency headcount responds to revenue before it responds to tools. What can be said is that the tasks a junior used to be hired to absorb are now the tasks that are cheapest to not hire for, and that is a structural pressure regardless of what caused this particular year's number.
The apprenticeship problem nobody has solved
If the first two years of a creative career were a training scheme funded by billable production work, and the production work leaves, the training scheme has lost its funding.
No agency has publicly replaced it. The options are all expensive: pay juniors to learn without producing, which is a straightforward cost; or hire fewer, later, and more senior, which passes the problem to whoever is meant to train the next generation of seniors.
The industry automated the bottom rung of the ladder and has not yet said what people are supposed to stand on.
What actually helps a first job now
Judgement is the thing being hired for, and judgement is demonstrated by choices rather than by output. A portfolio of twenty polished executions says less than five, each with an honest account of what was rejected and why.
That is harder to fake with a tool, and it is the specific thing a senior person is looking for when they ask what else you tried. Being able to answer that question well is now a larger share of the interview than it was five years ago.
Figures from the IPA Agency Census 2025. More on Ad Tribe Work Life.
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