A few years ago, a fresher walking into the agency would usually begin with the groundwork. Sitting through long briefs, pulling references, building moodboards, writing first-copy drafts or preparing presentation notes till late in the night. It was repetitive work— the learning phase, often invisible but the base of the entire campaign. This is the space where young creatives grasp the process, master cerebration, observe and develop creative instinct over time.
Today, much of that work can be done in minutes.
Across advertising and marketing agencies, AI tools like Claude are increasingly becoming part of everyday workflows. Teams are using them to summarise research, analyse briefs, generate copy routes, structure presentations, and explore multiple creative directions before arriving at a final campaign idea.
Sahil Shah, Chief Executive Officer, Dentsu Creative Isobar, says agencies are now using AI across three broad layers: productivity tools, generative tools and agentic workflows. Productivity tools are helping with research, competitor analysis, internal documentation and strategy support. Generative AI is increasingly being used for concept exploration, copy variations and visual ideation. The third layer, he says, involves AI systems beginning to execute multi-step tasks from a single brief.
“The biggest advantage for agencies is speed, scale, and optionality,” says Shah. “Teams can explore far more creative directions, test more ideas, and move from brief to output significantly faster than before,” he adds.
That acceleration is altering how agencies function internally. Campaign timelines are now shorter. Smaller teams are handling larger volumes of work. Processes that once moved in stages are now happening simultaneously.
Arjit Sachdeva, Co-founder, VDO.AI, believes AI is compressing traditional agency structures into more real-time systems of collaboration. “The planner, the designer and the data analyst are no longer working in sequence,” he says. “They are collaborating simultaneously, because AI compresses the workflow into a more iterative, feedback-driven loop.”
Sachdeva believes this is also weakening the traditional manpower-led agency model where scale was once directly tied to headcount. According to him, campaign intelligence has become real-time, with audience behaviour, contextual signals and creative performance now being interpreted simultaneously as campaigns unfold instead of only through retrospective analysis.
Another noticeable change is observed outside agencies. The gap between a large production setup and a small creative team is narrowing rapidly. Tasks that once required multiple departments, expensive shoots or long production cycles can now be executed with far fewer people and significantly less time. One of the reasons why several big advertisers like Tata Motors, HUL, Swiggy and Zomato are effectively working with their in-house creative teams for new campaigns.
AI is also reducing several operational friction points across content adaptation, Sachdeva notes. Creative versioning and media optimisation, areas that earlier consumed disproportionate amounts of time and manual effort, are now done much quicker.
The accessibility to quick production capabilities are also increasing the sheer volume of content entering the internet every day. Brands are no longer competing only with other brands for attention. They are now competing with creators, independent storytellers and AI-native content ecosystems that are moving at internet speed. In many ways, AI has democratised creative production. The advantage no longer lies only in access to resources, but in how quickly teams can think, adapt and execute.
Varun Khiatani, Co-founder, mktgstack, believes this has fundamentally changed the relationship between creativity and production value online. “Creative Production Budgets are no longer a concept,” he says, “There is genuinely no reason a social media team can't pitch a blockbuster-level film concept today, because they know they can generate it.”
According to Khiatani, brands are now competing in an environment where almost anyone with access to AI tools can create high-production-value content. “You can no longer blame the budget for boring work. Everyone now has access to virtually unlimited production value.” he states.
As AI becomes more deeply integrated into agency systems, one question is surfacing alongside the excitement around speed and scale. If AI is beginning to handle many of the first-layer tasks traditionally associated with junior creatives, what happens to the role of junior talent itself?
Rheya Hiremath, Growth & Strategy Director, Wife, says AI has already changed that equation significantly. “A lot of the entry-level tasks that once shaped creative instincts can now be automated instantly,” she says, adding that much of the repetitive groundwork that once introduced younger creatives to the process of thinking through campaigns is slowly disappearing.
However, Rahul Mathew, Chief Creative Officer, McCann India, believes AI should not be viewed as a replacement tool inside agencies. According to him, AI works more like another member inside the creative process, helping teams move past obvious first-level ideas faster or assisting with sourcing, edits and execution-heavy tasks. “We have to stop seeing AI as something that replaces. Rather see it as a person in the team,” he says.
While that has improved speed and reduced manual effort, it has also raised larger questions around how younger creatives will now develop instinct and craft inside agencies. Hiremath notes that many of these tasks, although repetitive, helped creatives learn how to observe, analyse and gradually develop taste over time. “The challenge is that those tasks also trained people to observe, analyse, and develop taste,” she says
At the same time, younger creatives themselves are beginning to approach work differently because of AI. Anand Menon, Creator, The New Thing, says AI has changed the confidence with which junior creatives approach unfamiliar briefs. “There really isn’t a brief you can look at and go, ‘I don’t know where to start,’” he says. According to Menon, AI is helping younger creatives understand difficult categories faster, pressure-test ideas and work more independently.
Before AI, he says, many young creatives would avoid categories like finance or B2B marketing because of how intimidating they felt. “AI is creating jacks of all trades and masters of some. And that’s a great thing for a junior creative.” he notes.
But while AI is reducing entry barriers in some ways, agencies are also beginning to expect far more from young talent entering the industry. “There is no place for a narrow specialist at the junior level in any creative field anymore,” says Khiatani. “The tools have made it inexcusable to only do one thing,” highlighting the expectations CD’s have from their team now.
He believes younger creatives are now expected to think across functions, formats and platforms instead of operating within rigid creative roles. “The question asked of young talent won't be ‘can you write?’ or ‘can you design?’ It'll be ‘can you think, build, and ship across formats, platforms, and mediums, by Thursday?’”
According to Shah, junior creatives are now needs to contribute higher-value thinking much earlier in their careers instead of spending years only handling execution-heavy tasks. With AI increasingly accelerating research, ideation and exploration, individual capability is also expanding faster than before. A junior creative with access to the right tools can now process information, test multiple directions and build outputs at a scale that earlier may have required larger teams or significantly more time.
Even so, most industry leaders do not believe junior creatives are disappearing from agency structures.
“Absolutely not,” says Hiremath, when asked whether junior creatives will stop having a role going forward. “But the role will look different. You can no longer come in and coast on execution. The bar for thinking moves down the org chart.”
According to her, the bigger risk is not AI replacing junior talent, but agencies failing to invest in them properly. “Fresh perspectives and cultural instincts come from people living it, not from a model trained on yesterday’s internet,” she says. “The agencies that win will use AI to elevate junior talent, not eliminate them.”
Mathew believes the faster execution enabled by AI could actually create more room for mentorship and experimentation inside agencies. “With the pains of execution taken out, there may be more room for experimentation,” he says. According to him, younger creatives are often quicker at adapting to technological changes, and agency structures have historically evolved alongside every major industry transition.
At the same time, agencies are also becoming aware of another challenge. As more teams begin using similar tools and prompts, creative outputs can begin to resemble one another. Hiremath describes it as “creative flattening.” “A tool trained on everything tends to produce work that resembles everything,” she says.
Shah echoes a similar concern around overdependence. While AI is helping agencies move faster and explore more creative routes, he believes excessive reliance on these systems could weaken original thinking over time. According to him, the value humans bring increasingly comes from taste, judgment, cultural understanding and the ability to connect dots meaningfully.
Menon believes that distinction may become even more important in an AI-assisted industry. “AI will give you 50 options,” he says. “A good creative takes the time and patience to pick out the ones they’re gravitating towards and further develop them.”
Agencies will continue integrating AI deeper into their workflows, but the role of junior creatives may not disappear. The path into creativity, however, is clearly evolving. What is changing is the path into the industry. Young creatives are now being expected to contribute much earlier in their careers than before.
