The vanishing career ladder: AI and the future of the public relations entry-level workforce

As AI absorbs the production work that trained junior practitioners, public relations risks dismantling the ladder that builds future advisers.

Public relations has traditionally recruited apprentices and graduates and trained them on the job: monitoring, reporting, drafting and pitching. This is productive work that pays for itself while practitioners develop judgment through supervised practice.

AI tools now monitor media, summarise coverage, draft press releases, build pitches and construct content plans. This is already an operational reality across agencies and in-house teams.

Research confirms what practitioners sense. A 2025 study of entry-level professionals in a global consultancy found junior staff rapidly automating routine tasks using generative AI: slide creation, email drafting, research synthesis and content production.

Managers, meanwhile, use the same tools to complete work that they once delegated. This mechanism through which tacit knowledge transfers is disappearing from both ends of the hierarchy. Tools designed to accelerate development may instead remove the experiences through which professional judgement is built.

Culture and governance have slowed adoption in some organisations. But the Block restructuring shows how quickly restraint can collapse. Markets reward operational cost discipline based on AI effectiveness and efficiency. This is the very immediate challenge for the leaders of public relations agencies within a holding company structure.

The pressure does not stop at the entry level. Mid-level practitioners in public relations are defined by production: drafting releases, constructing pitches, building content plans, synthesising research and managing execution. Generative AI performs these tasks extremely well.

Between automated production and rising strategic expectations sits a tier of practitioners whose value proposition is eroding faster than their advisory capability is developing. The belief that public relations is somehow insulated from this shift is wishful thinking. 

The broken pipeline 

Advisory capability develops through years of practice, feedback, error and incremental responsibility. The traditional career ladder in public relations enabled that progression.

If AI removes entry-level work, fewer juniors are hired, meaning fewer practitioners progress through the system. Fewer developed practitioners means fewer credible advisers. 

The upstream professional advisory argument depends on a pipeline that is being dismantled in front of us.

A generation of AI-fluent but experientially thin practitioners may reach mid-career with impressive tool competence and shallow foundations. This is a structural risk for a discipline built on accumulated judgment and relational capital. 

As my co-editor of AI for Public Relations: A How-To Guide for Implementation and Management, Ben Verinder, noted last week, “We are going to see practice cutting off its own blood supply.”

What must change

None of this is inevitable. But it does require a deliberate redesign of the career ladder and development within public relations practice.

Early career development must shift from production volume to supervised judgment. If AI handles drafting, junior practitioners must be embedded in strategic problem-solving, governance discussions and decision-making earlier and intentionally.

Public relations practice needs an honest reckoning with its advisory ambition. Governance gaps around AI are real. Reputational risk is real. But advisory credibility demands commercial literacy, regulatory awareness and board-level fluency. These capabilities are unevenly distributed.

Workforce transition must be treated as a strategic leadership issue. The gap between the skills AI is eliminating (monitoring, drafting and content) and the capabilities organisations will demand (orchestration, judgement, risk and relational capital) is significant.

The career development ladder within public relations practice is disappearing in front of us. We need to build a new one before we discover there is nothing left to climb.

Further reading

This essay was originally posted on my Substack. The newsletter is read by more than 5,000 communications and public relations practitioners twice a week. We take a slower, critical perspective to distilling news, research and industry developments into actionable briefings to help you at work.