Thirty years ago, a new hire at a marketing and PR agency could expect to spend much of the day writing press releases, developing media pitches, and preparing research reports. Between assignments, the employee would sit in meetings, study client materials, and gradually learn how the business worked.
Today, AI can handle many of those tasks for as little as $20 a month.
Paul Roetzer, founder and CEO of Marketing AI and SmarterX, opened his MAICON 2026 keynote by reflecting on his own experience as the young marketing professional he described.
His point raised an important question for agency leaders: If AI takes over the work that once helped new employees learn the business, how will companies develop their future leaders?
Stream Creative's Brian Brinkman has been considering this question since returning from MAICON. As someone actively exploring how AI can improve agency operations, he sees both the opportunities and the challenges ahead.
As AI takes on more entry-level work, companies may begin questioning whether they need to hire as many junior employees.
"The keynote really resonated with me because there's this belief we can just replace a bunch of people, especially people in entry-level roles, with AI,” says Brinkman. “But when you cut those jobs, you’re losing the opportunity to pass on company knowledge and parts of the business AI doesn’t know.”
In his keynote, Roetzer shared a similar story. A law firm partner asked him whether the firm still needed to hire associates. He answered with a question of his own: who will the partners be in ten years?
“If you don't train for the next levels of work and help people grow their careers, it will become a real organizational issue,” agrees Brinkman.
Roetzer acknowledged increased productivity could reduce the number of employees companies need, particularly if demand for their services remains unchanged. He challenged leaders to consider how AI could help them grow their businesses while continuing to invest in their people.
Roetzer introduced three roles to illustrate how organizations might evolve as AI becomes more deeply integrated into everyday work:
The architect: Designs the strategies and workflows guiding how people and AI work together.
The orchestrator: Manages the work, directing AI systems and colleagues while evaluating results and making decisions.
The apprentice: Develops the experience and judgment needed to take on greater responsibilities by learning from experienced colleagues and working alongside AI.
Roetzer presented the framework as a starting point for discussion rather than a definitive organizational model. His larger message: traditional job descriptions are changing, and leaders need to reconsider how employees develop within their organizations.
The apprentice role is especially important because it addresses a fundamental challenge facing companies that are increasingly relying on AI for entry-level work.
Traditionally, entry-level employees contributed to day-to-day production while learning the skills needed to advance. Even routine assignments gave new hires opportunities to understand how experienced colleagues approached problems and made decisions.
As AI assumes more of the work, companies need to be more intentional about developing young professionals. Roetzer's apprentice model treats training as an investment in future talent, with newer employees learning directly from experienced colleagues while developing the skills to eventually design and manage AI-assisted workflows.
An apprentice learns through:
Shadowing and mentorship
Frameworks for evaluating AI-assisted work
Opportunities to experiment without immediate ROI expectations
Visibility into how senior colleagues and AI systems reach their conclusions
Roetzer also referenced a post from Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke about the risk of allowing AI to perform work without creating opportunities for employees to learn from it. When interactions with AI happen privately, valuable knowledge can remain with individual employees rather than benefiting the broader organization.
For marketing teams, concerns extend beyond entry-level training. AI is also changing how employees work across traditional departmental boundaries.
According to Roetzer, AI is changing the boundaries between traditional job responsibilities. Senior employees can now handle work that previously required junior staff, while professionals in marketing, sales, and operations are taking on tasks that once fell outside their areas of expertise.
Brinkman has seen a similar shift at Stream Creative, where a project manager is using AI to automate tasks beyond her usual responsibilities for a client.
“AI is allowing people to learn new processes and gain new power to integrate it into tasks, expanding how they work,” he says. “I think we are seeing that job descriptions are being ‘un-siloed’ with AI. It's not really about fewer people, but about making people more productive with their time and abilities.”
Brinkman has also been exploring how AI can help marketers develop capabilities beyond their traditional responsibilities. At MAICON 2026, he led a session titled Build Your Own Marketing App in 40 Minutes, No Code Required, where attendees experimented with building their own app.
His experience reflects Roetzer's architect role, while other members of the Stream Creative team are finding opportunities to apply AI in exploring new and interesting responsibilities.
Roetzer's framework also recognizes employees may take on more than one role. A project manager who designs an automated workflow, evaluates its performance, and learns a new process along the way is effectively acting as an architect, orchestrator, and apprentice.
For Brinkman, the opportunity lies in helping employees build on their existing knowledge while developing the skills to take on more advanced work.
Understanding which skills employees already have and where they need to develop is another part of preparing marketing teams for AI.
Roetzer also introduced the Personal AI Score, a free self-assessment from SmarterX that was in public beta at the time of the conference. The approximately 10-minute assessment evaluates 37 statements across five areas:
Knowledge
Application
Judgment
Impact
Mindset
Participants receive an overall score, along with individual ratings for identifying their strengths and opportunities for improvement. Results are private by default.
Brinkman sees potential for using a framework like the Personal AI Score to help employees develop skills to make their work more rewarding.
“I can see this becoming a framework that we, as an organization, are likely to lean into,” he says. “People should enjoy their jobs and the tasks they do, and I think this type of assessment could be quite helpful as AI becomes more integrated into how we work.”
Roetzer's keynote raised questions marketing leaders can no longer afford to put off. As AI changes the work employees do, agencies and marketing departments need to rethink how they develop talent and create opportunities for growth. The decisions leaders make today will influence the skills and experience their teams bring to the business years from now.
At Stream Creative, we're exploring how AI can help our team work more effectively while expanding what's possible for our clients. Wondering how AI could change the way your marketing team works? Let's talk about where to start.