The missing rung

For decades, marketing careers followed a predictable path. Young professionals would start as interns, move into entry-level roles, and gradually work their way up the hierarchy. This early period often involved doing less glamorous tasks—creating decks, editing content, reporting data, and tweaking assets. But these activities provided invaluable learning experiences. Over time, individuals developed instincts, judgment, and expertise simply by doing the work. This foundation was crucial for building future leadership.

However, this traditional career ladder is now breaking down.

Recent payroll data from institutions like Stanford and ADP reveals a significant decline—up to 13%—in employment among workers in their late twenties who occupy AI-exposed roles. This is not a temporary dip but a structural shift. Most notably, the decline is hitting the very segment that traditionally included interns and new graduates: the entry-level jobs at the bottom rung of the career pyramid.

The initial tasks that once made these careers possible—drafting, producing, analyzing and cleaning data—are the very types of work that AI is now absorbing. If these early roles disappear, the entire career ladder risks collapsing.

Internships and entry-level positions have long served as the proving ground—a place to learn by doing, make mistakes, and improve. This bottom rung has always been essential for talent development.

Today, AI is cutting deepest at this entry point. Traditional career pipelines—internship to junior role to mid-level, then senior—are being severed right at their base. Internships are converting less often into jobs, and many entry-level roles no longer appear. The work that once laid the foundation for a career is being erased.

Without a way to get on the ladder, tomorrow’s leaders cannot climb it.

At first glance, this disruption might seem beneficial: greater efficiency, cost savings, and automation of mundane tasks such as drafting copy, building decks, or pulling data. However, these short-term gains come at a significant long-term cost.

Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) who hollow out the entry layer are essentially cutting off their supply of future talent. Agencies that eliminate junior roles dismantle their apprenticeship models. Without interns and juniors learning the ropes, agencies become less relvant, staffed only by senior personnel who operate AI tools that clients could easily purchase and use themselves.

The client-agency relationship deteriorates, talent pipelines dry up, and brands become hollow shells of their former selves. Efficiency without development leads to a dead end.

Protecting the entry-level rung does not mean preserving old job descriptions as they were. Instead, these roles need to be reinvented for the AI age:

• From Execution to Orchestration: Junior staff should learn how to prompt AI effectively, set proper guardrails, and critically evaluate AI outputs. 

• From Repetition to Interpretation: While AI handles routine analysis, humans add value by connecting these insights to broader strategy, brand identity, and business impact.

• From Shadowing to Co-Piloting: Early-career talent must work alongside AI tools, developing fluency in workflows that will dominate marketing for the next decade. 

This marks a new apprenticeship model—no longer hands on keyboards doing manual work, but hands-on with the AI systems themselves.

The responsibility lies heavily on CMOs: while prioritizing efficiency, they must also protect the foundation of their talent funnel. The bottom of the pyramid needs to be preserved and redesigned into AI-augmented apprenticeships that cultivate future leaders, not just produce outputs.

Agencies must see their relevance in this new world as suppliers of talent pipelines, not merely providers of deliverables like decks and reports. If agencies fail to reinvent how juniors learn and grow within their organizations, clients may soon question why they need agencies at all. 

The marketing industry stands at a crossroads: protect the rung, redesign the bottom, and build for the future—or surrender everything to automation.

And good luck maintaining relevance and engagement in 2026 without a strong foundation.