Junior Strategist 2029, Day 1.

This is what your first day in the marketing, media, advertising, and tech industry will be.

You, and ~4 other entry-level strategists (the industry overall will be smaller and therefore each new class), will check in at the lobby and be led to a room with a few table rows of laptops.

There will still be stale coffee and croissants in the corner of the room—the last bastion of humanity.

It will feel more like taking a college exam than a welcome orientation.

The HR 'proctor' will give you each a login to the company's junior strategist intake protocol. She will try to crack a joke to break the tension.

She will fail.

For the next two hours, you will answer everything from your name, age, weight, and height to a long series of AI-powered questions designed to figure out how you learn. In silence.

It's not testing your IQ, per se.

It's probing the best way to serve you information for your job—through metaphor, using example scenarios, relating emotionally, relating unemotionally, using numbers, using graphs, using graphs in the style of Mondrian, etc.

AI will transform your answers into a system prompt (or invisible, personalized pre-prompt) for all future questions you ask of your company's AI.

How the company processes and intakes your preferences will exemplify its 'house style'—formerly known as the difference between David Droga, David Ogilvy, and Dan Wieden.

Everybody—your line manager, your teammates, your CSO—will have a digital twin available 24/7 to 'support' you. Again, only the most complex tasks will be escalated for human interaction.

70% of your job will be rechecking AI's automated work.

For instance, a client brief to create a social media campaign will be resolved within minutes with AI spitting out countless asset variations and a recommended media plan based on budget, targeting, timing and best practices.

As a junior strategist, you will be asked to check work the AI randomly selects for review. Is it on strategy (it's already been checked 2x by the AI)? Is there another insight the AI should consider? Should asset #2311 be escalated for Director Bot for additional review? Akin to content moderation.

20% of your job will be AI-assisted origination.

You may be asked to complete a competitive review side-by-side with 10 agents... after your AI twin has already done its first ten passes.

You will give feedback and add your personal touch of analysis... but only when the AI prompts for you to do so.

Slide decks, word docs and spreadsheets will all be obsolete. When your competitive review is done, it will simply be uploaded as training data for others (and others' twins) to query.

Keep in mind: you will not be allowed to think alone-- everything will be watermarked as AI-assisted or it will be immediately discarded.

10% of your job will be looking for your next job.

You will have an army of 'future you' bots probing LinkedIn and selling your "talents" to other companies. This army will be API’d into your day job so it's always up-to-date—a real-time job market.

When you find your next job, your current company will allow you to 'port' your training data to the next company like your mobile number under contractual agreement that you will not take its system prompt (or 'house style') with you.

Your growing training database will be your increasingly 'experienced' twin will be your value to the industry.

The good news: you'll be allowed to work from home.

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Opinions are mine alone and do not reflect the policy, strategy or point of view of any client or company, past, present or future.