A woman I used to work with bought me a coffee at Ovation last week and asked, very politely, whether she should give up. She is two years out of school, she wants to be a strategist, and the tasks she was hired to do have quietly stopped existing. The category scan is generated. The competitor audit is generated. The first-pass deck lands before she has finished reading the brief.
Her team is thrilled. Her manager called it a huge unlock. Nobody has told her what she is supposed to be doing instead, because nobody knows.
I sat with that on the walk back and I have not put it down since.
The work we just automated was not filler. It was the apprenticeship. Reading forty competitor sites in a week is how you develop a nose for when a category has gone homogenous. Transcribing your own interviews is how you learn that people say the true thing in the third answer, not the first. Rebuilding somebody else's deck at eleven at night is how you learn which slides survive contact with a client and which ones die.
Judgment is not taught, it is accumulated, and we have just deleted most of the surface where the accumulation used to happen.
The industry answer so far is that juniors will move up the value chain and focus on higher-order thinking. I have read that sentence in three different decks this quarter. Nobody has explained the mechanism. You do not get higher-order thinking by handing someone higher-order problems on day one. You get a person who can operate the tool and cannot tell when the tool is confidently wrong, which it is, constantly, in ways that read fine to anyone without a pattern library.
Two things I think are true. One, if you run a team, you now have to design the apprenticeship on purpose, because the org chart used to supply it for free and no longer does. Make people do the interviews. Make them stand in the store. Make them defend a recommendation they cannot attribute to a machine.
Two, if you are the junior, do the boring work anyway, on your own time if you have to. The scan you generate teaches you nothing. The scan you crawl through teaches you the category.
Judgment is not taught, it is accumulated, and we have just deleted most of the surface where the accumulation used to happen.
I told her not to give up, which she expected, and told her to spend a Saturday in four Portland grocery stores writing down what sits at eye level and what got pushed to the bottom shelf. I built my own pattern library that way, slowly, on floors covered in printouts that Barnaby insisted on sitting directly in the middle of. It was tedious. It is also the only part nobody can hand me.