A white-collar world without junior staff?

Professional business models may need to change if novices lose the opportunities to learn and progress when AI takes over their work.

- Sarah O'Connor

One of my first jobs as a trainee reporter was to write a daily stock market report. It was the sort of task that wouldn't trouble an experienced journalist, but for a novice like me, it was scary and hard.

I was lucky, though: After I filed my draft, my editor would have me stand behind his shoulder and watch his screen while he edited it. He would explain out loud what he was changing and why, which helped me learn how to do it a bit better the next day.

I thought of him when I read The Skill Code, a book published in 2024 by the academic Matt Beane, which argues that the "working bond" between experts and learners has been "the bedrock of humanity's transfer of skills and ingenuity for millennia". But can it survive the age of artificial intelligence (AI)?

So far, the tasks for which generative AI seems most suited are also those that many white-collar trainees tend to do. When researchers at the Brookings Institution, a US think-tank, analysed data from OpenAI, they found the percentage of tasks at high risk of automation was five times higher for a market research analyst than for a marketing manager, for example. It was three times higher for a sales representative than a sales manager, and more than twice as high for a graphic designer than for an art director.