AI Is Replacing How We Build Leaders

AI isn’t replacing senior marketers. It’s absorbing the work that junior marketers were hired to do: the research, the reporting, the first-pass analysis, the repetitive operational tasks that no one loved but everyone learned from.

That matters more than it appears to. Those tasks were never just about getting the work done. They were the mechanism through which early-career talent built judgment, pattern recognition, and instinct. The coordinator who manually pulled campaign performance data every week developed an eye for anomalies. The analyst who built the first draft of a competitive brief learned how to frame a strategic question. Remove those reps and the skills still need to develop somewhere.

McKinsey’s latest research on the agentic organization puts it directly: the asymmetry is striking. AI can automate a much larger share of junior-level work than managerial work. That means the layer of the organization where future leaders are formed is the layer most exposed to change.

For CMOs, this is not an HR problem to delegate. Marketing teams are among the heaviest users of early-career talent, and the roles most affected sit directly in the marketing function. The CMOs who redesign those roles around apprenticeship, structured decision-making exposure, and real mentorship will have stronger benches in five years. Those who let AI quietly absorb the developmental layer may not notice what’s missing until it’s too late to rebuild.

Source: McKinsey, 2026