AI and Junior Roles: Who’s Training Your Future Experts?

Think back to your first proper job. The tasks were often dull: first drafts, spreadsheets and research that went nowhere (and endless photocopying and filing…). Yet they were how you learned your craft. Now AI can do that work in seconds, and it’s reshaping junior roles faster than most leaders realise.

That shift raises a question every business owner should be asking. If AI handles the groundwork, who is training your future experts?

The junior rung is wobbling

The numbers are striking. UK graduate job listings fell below 10,000 in January 2026, down 45% on the year before, according to Adzuna data reported by techUK.

Of course, AI isn’t the only cause. Rising costs and a cautious global economy play their part too. However, in professional services, AI is absorbing much of the work that once trained new starters. Meanwhile, few firms have worked out what should replace it.

So the debate about AI and junior roles isn’t really about technology. It’s a leadership question.

What leaders and boards should ask

Mark Lancelott’s recent Hult Ashridge article, Nobody knows how AI will reshape the organisation, puts this well. He argues that AI’s ability to do a task doesn’t prove you can safely remove the role.

Instead, he says leaders should first consider what happens to the development of future expertise. That’s a vital point for anyone making decisions about AI and junior roles.

He also names declining expertise as an early warning sign that a business is weakening. You won’t see it in this quarter’s results but you’ll see it in three years, when you need a new manager and the bench is empty.

His conclusion is both apt and worrying, especially if people move too fast in implementation: “companies can outsource technology, but not the consequences of using it.”

Where the pressure really lands

Lancelott makes another point that will feel familiar. When AI speeds up one part of the work, the bottleneck simply moves somewhere else.

For example, a junior or trainee might use AI to produce a polished draft in twenty minutes. It looks impressive. However, they can’t yet tell whether it’s right, because they lack the experience to spot confident errors. As a result, the draft lands on a senior colleague’s desk for checking without any critical thinking having been applied.

The work hasn’t really got faster. Instead, the thinking has shifted to your busiest and most expensive people. Over time, that quietly drains your senior capacity.

How AI is changing junior roles

The good news is that AI isn’t erasing junior roles so much as reshaping them. PwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer found that entry-level roles are becoming “seniorised” (I can’t believe that’s even a word, but hey ho!). In other words, new starters need judgement and people skills much earlier in their careers. That’s a challenge, because judgement usually grows from the repetitive work AI now handles. So is there even a happy balance to strike here?

Encouragingly, a 2026 field study by KPMG and University of Texas researchers suggests a way forward. It identified three types of early-career AI user. Apprentices use AI to learn. Delegators hand their thinking over to it. Amplifiers use it to extend thinking they’ve already started. Crucially, raw critical-thinking ability didn’t predict who thrived but how people actually used the tools did. That’s a habit, and leaders can shape habits.

Three questions for leaders this month

Whether you lead a scale-up of 200 or you’re about to hire your first apprentice, these questions are worth asking.

1.  Which tasks taught your people their craft? If AI has absorbed them, something needs to replace that learning.

2.  Are your juniors using AI to learn, or to avoid thinking? Asking them to explain their reasoning will usually tell you.

3.  Who is coaching judgement, and do they have time? Managers can only develop others if they have the skills and the capacity.

Making AI and junior roles work together

Ultimately, AI and junior roles can work well together. However, that only happens when leaders design for learning, not just output. AI can take on the routine tasks. Your job as a leader is to make sure the learning those tasks provided doesn’t disappear with them.

In my next post, I’ll get practical about how to build critical thinking in junior staff when AI writes the first draft. After that, I’ll explore what leaders must keep doing themselves, however good the tools get.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you. How are you developing junior talent now that AI handles so much of the groundwork?