@tjrobertson52

There's been a lot of talk lately about how AI is gonna wipe out half of all entry level white collar jobs. As someone who is currently hiring and who works in, I think, the industry that's most disrupted by AI, digital marketing, I just wanna talk about my experience and how I kind of see this playing out right now. I don't think we yet know what effect AI will have on jobs, but there are no shortage of examples where AI is as good or better than the average entry level person at a given task.

Graphic designers, copywriters, developers, marketing strategists. AI is already as good or better than the average entry level person in each of these fields. Now, of course it's not as good as the top people in these fields.

There's still plenty of room for experts. And even more importantly, these AI can't take those jobs. You can't just fire your graphic designer and stick an AI there instead.

There are still certain things you need a human to do that AI just can't yet do. Things like understanding large amounts of context and working autonomously for days on end. However, the value that a human brings to these entry level positions is less about skills and knowledge and more about taste and judgment.

And that's how hiring for entry level positions has changed. For me, a few years ago, if I was looking to hire an entry level person to be in Charge of our copywriting. I wanted someone with a lot of experience doing copywriting.

If I was looking to bring in a junior level person to help with graphic design, I wanted someone who had some experience doing graphic design. Now, again, I just wanna clarify, I'm talking about entry level positions. These are situations where all their work is still gonna be reviewed by me or another expert.

Nowadays, when I'm hiring for these positions, I'm just gonna create an SOP in which the actual work is being done by an AI. So the person I'm hiring is just following the SOP, giving the task to AI, and then reviewing the AI's work. Now, when I say it like that, it makes it seem like I could just slot any human in that role, but it's really not the case.

Good judgment, or in the case of creative work, good taste is incredibly important. But what's much less important is the actual skills and knowledge to do the task. So as of right now, I'm still hiring for a lot of entry level positions.

I'm just not hiring people that are training for the specific task I'm giving them. And more crucially, to the point, they're able to output a lot more work than they would have a few years ago. Because of AI.

However, I'm actually not hiring any less than I would have a few years ago. We're just doing a lot more work. We've at Least tripled the amount of deliverables we give our clients for the same rate.

However, I know there's other agencies that are taking the other approach. The agency I left to start, this one, for example, they just stopped hiring because they realised they could do the same amount of work with fewer people. So it's very hard to predict if AI.

Is gonna wipe out half of entry level white collar jobs. But what I think we can confidently predict is that the nature of entry level white collar jobs is going to change significantly. I think whatever basic skills or knowledge you've acquired is going to be much less important.

And your ability to use AI tools and apply good judgment is going to become much more important.