I hear a version of this conversation in almost every agency I work with these days. Someone points out how much faster everything moves now – research that used to take a junior half a day gets done by a tool in seconds, media lists that took an afternoon to build by hand now build themselves, a first draft of a press release appears before you've finished your coffee–everyone nods. On paper, this is the epitome of efficiency.

It isn't. It's the quiet removal of the only training ground this profession has ever had.

I've been recruiting PR talent for 30 years, and from the outside, the entry-level job has always looked like admin. Trawling through coverage, building media lists contact by contact, sitting in on client calls with nothing to contribute except your attention, just to hear how your boss handled a tricky question. You'd draft a press release, your senior would mark it up and hand it back, you'd redo it, and this happened over and over. That was the job. 

And it was also, without anyone naming it, the entire curriculum. You learn what a good media list looks like by building fifty average ones first; you learn to tell a pitch that'll land from one that won't by watching a hundred of them get turned down. Slow. Not glamorous. But it did the actual work of teaching juniors the craft.

Now, AI has taken over this exact layer. And because it looks like admin rather than expertise, almost nobody has noticed what's actually disappearing: the way junior talent learns.

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