Want an AI-Native Team? Hire More Juniors

Happy Wednesday! Before I get started this week, Anthropic gave me three week-long “guest passes” for Claude Code. Grab yours at https://claude.ai/referral/TIk7boIXzA — first-come, first-served.

Without further ado, let’s get started with this week’s newsletter! — Dan

I spent an hour on Joseph Gallo's Comms Confidential podcast recently and the episode just dropped this week. It was a great conversation and I encourage you to listen to the whole thing. For now, I want to focus on one particular point I wasn’t planning to make: if you actually want an AI-forward comms team, you need to keep hiring more junior employees.

Right now, the opposite is happening — anecdotally, we’re seeing fewer and fewer opportunities for entry-level communicators and those with only a few years of experience. I’ve had a lot of conversations with people who would normally be in the position to hire for these roles, and beyond macro job market concerns, I’m hearing the same refrains. One, nobody has time to train a junior — "you have to train them and you have to work with them and we're too busy to do that." Two, there's a quiet assumption that AI already covers the entry-level work: you hire someone with zero to three years of experience and realize that ChatGPT can often provide a similar result as they can. When junior team members leave, those roles don’t get backfilled.

But when this happens, comms leaders are accidentally killing the one thing they want: AI-native teams that can build with AI instead of just using it. I made this point on the podcast with Joe, reaching for the closest example I have:

"You want to bring people into the fold who are entering this AI-first world as AI natives. And that's who's doing it. I have a college-aged son who will be graduating in a couple of years. And I keep encouraging him — every time he does something he's allowed to for class... run it through ChatGPT. I'm going to get him started on Claude Code over the summer."

We’ve done some of that, but it turns out that I didn’t have to do much — he’s already doing a lot of it anyway. And that’s important: if the new, AI-native way is the “normal” way of working for him, he’ll never have to unlearn anything or adapt. It’ll just be natural for him.

But there’s a catch — and this is where I try hard not to oversell it. AI-native doesn't mean job-ready. Someone fluent in the tools still has to learn the actual craft: what makes a pitch land, when a message is off, when to not hit send. Basically, the “judgment” part of the work. That part hasn't gotten any faster and AI can — and does — work against younger communicators here, because chatbots can give them false confidence and bad advice. I do wonder, and fear, if that problem will cause teams to hire fewer and fewer junior teammates, as from a short-term perspective, it’s rational to avoid hiring people who don’t have good judgment, even if they’re “better with AI.” Teams that will win long-term will understand that it’s incumbent upon senior communicators to mentor junior ones, helping them build that judgment so that ChatGPT doesn’t.

Because here’s the big unlock: once they learn what good looks like, the newbie communicator’s tool fluency stops being a party trick and starts being leverage. As I put it to Joe: "what they need to learn is how does communications work generally. And once they do, it's like they have a jet pack on."

And best of all, that lines up with what senior communicators are doing anyway. I told Joe about a friend of mine, a comms leader, and her completely reasonable reaction — she’s never going to use AI to build workflows or really use AI beyond the magic search box and drafting tool. As I said to Joe, “the reason why is because she already has that infrastructure in place. She has the junior members who do the first draft of the press release, who put together the comms plans. She's there to advise the C-suite and other executives on strategy."

She's not wrong, and that's the whole point. Her judgment, her creativity, her sometimes-cynicism — AI isn't replacing any of that, so she has little reason to go learn to build with it. As I said on the pod, “that's where she is in her career... it's the next generation that it does." Which means if you strip out the junior tier, you've also removed the only people in the building with a real incentive to turn AI from a faster typewriter into something that actually changes the work.

That's why the "AI means we need fewer people" math has it backwards for comms — and why it's already biting. In the Boston Consulting Group survey we talked about on the show, 68% of CCOs describe their own function as a laggard on AI but more than a quarter plan to reduce headcount or freeze hiring. You don't fix a number like that by asking your busiest, most senior people to become tool-builders in their spare time. You fix it by hiring the people who'll do it without being asked.

If that sounds like theory, look at who's already staffing for it. Columbia University recently posted for an "AI Generalist" — a junior role whose entire job is to be the front door for AI requests across the institution, helping faculty and staff find the right tools and workflows — reporting to its Sr. Director of AI & Emerging Technologies, right alongside an "AI Solutions Engineer" hired to build what that generalist scopes. That's, coincidentally, close to the exact structure I argued for on the show: someone who knows the domain leading it, and people whose actual job is to build. It's an org chart growing a limb for AI, not shedding one.

Freeze that pipeline and you've optimized this quarter's headcount at the exact cost of ever becoming the team you keep telling everyone you want to be. Invest in the AI builders and you’re the one with the jet packs next fiscal.

Subscribe to The AI Report, the free 5-minute daily AI brief for 400,000+ business leaders, and you’ll get 37 Claude prompts free in your welcome email. They’re organised by the 8 situations every manager faces. You get both: the newsletter and the prompts.

Subscribe & Get the Prompts

Baseball legend Yogi Berra famously said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." It sounds like nonsense and… well, it is. But when it comes to thought leadership, communicators are facing a fork where we need to take all paths simultaneously.

And because they’re in charge, they can have it both ways. What are communicators to do?

Jennifer Walker of PANBlast took to LinkedIn to weigh in on this impasse, and she has some good advice. She argues that one of the biggest risks of AI-assisted thought leadership isn't the draft itself — it's what happens when executives never meaningfully engage with it. She advises communications teams to treat AI-generated drafts as conversation starters. Getting on calendars can be tough, but it’s incumbent upon us to sit down with spokespeople to challenge assumptions, add stories, sharpen opinions, and surface the experiences that only the executive can provide.

In other words, we need to always remember: The goal is for the final piece to reflect the leader's thinking, not the AI's writing. And as Walker points out, copy that looks like it is AI written seems lazy and hurts the spokesperson’s (and brand’s) credibility. Our role — as those bringing judgment in communications — is to make that clear to the teams we are supporting.

But our role goes beyond education. We still need to guard against the problems of AI slop. To that end, here’s an idea. Instead of asking stakeholders “is this draft approved,” ask them more pointed questions:

Those conversations not only produce stronger content, but also help executives become more comfortable using AI as a partner instead of a ghostwriter — you’re getting them to think critically about AI-drafted copy. Put this into action next time you share a draft, regardless of whether human or robot first put pen to paper.

AI adoption is critical for communications teams — and I can help. Let’s work together to get your team moving — or moving faster.

📋 A prompt playbook. Need a kickstart? My communications-focused prompt playbook has more than 600 prompts to help you get started. Download it, free.

🎓 Self-paced learning. I’ve created six courses to get you up to speed on how AI impacts communications. Get started here.

📅 A strategy call. Whether you're trying to build systematic AI adoption across your team or focused on AI search visibility for your brand or organization, I’m here to help. Learn more and book an intro call.

Speak your prompts into ChatGPT or Claude and get detailed, paste-ready input that actually gives you useful output. Wispr Flow captures what you'd cut when typing. Free on Mac, Windows, and iPhone.

Try Wispr Flow free

Looking for a role at the intersection of communications and AI? Here are some opportunities to check out:

Was this forwarded to you by a friend or colleague? Want to get this in your inbox next week? Click here to subscribe!

Quick question: how can I help?

What workflows are you struggling with? Where does AI still feel mysterious or overwhelming? What has worked that you’d like to share with others?

I’m a builder, and I’d love to help you and the rest of The Comms Stack community find great new ways to use AI.

Reply and tell me.
I read every response.

Even a one-sentence reply helps. For example:
“I wish AI could help me with ______.”

Until next Wednesday,

Dan

Advertise | Subscribe