If agents do the junior work, where do senior hires come from?
A Singapore labor-data founder, a UK HR director and a US founder-educator on how to grow senior talent once agents take the routine work.
Dr. Christiane Schroeter puts it plainly: "Tasks can move to agents. Accountability stays with a person."
Fine. But accountable people have to come from somewhere.
Three experts, three countries, one worry: if the agent takes the entry-level work, who grows into the senior role?
This is not an anti-agent panel. It is a pipeline problem, and pipelines are easy to ignore until they run dry.
We asked what happens to senior talent when AI takes over entry-level tasks. It matters now because routine work is the first thing to move, and it is also where most careers start.
Keep the learning work in the junior seat.
Deepanker Mahajan, Founder of SkillDrift (Singapore, Singapore)
“When a company hires one junior at a time, that person has to learn the work that leads to a senior role. My view is that companies should keep that work in the junior role, and check the skills each junior builds every quarter.”
“Entry level work is where people build judgement. If an agent takes all of it, nobody will be ready for the senior role later.”
His fix is a rule plus a checkup: protect the work, then measure what it builds.
Judgement is a rep count.
Sarah Gray, HR Director of Cintra (Milton Keynes, United Kingdom)
“When routine tasks move to software, HR should protect the junior work where judgement is learned, because that is where senior people come from.”
“People tend to become senior by making supervised judgements many times, and that has to be designed in on purpose.”
Her angle: seniority is built by design, not by waiting. HR owns that design, and the word doing the heavy lifting is supervised.
Checking the work can teach the work.
Dr. Christiane Schroeter, Founder, PhD in Applied Economics, TEDx speaker of Hello Happy Nest LLC (San Luis Obispo, United States)
“Have juniors review, correct and explain the agent's output. Checking the work teaches the same judgment that doing the work used to teach.”
Same goal as the other two, different route. Juniors stay in the loop, but as reviewers instead of doers, with a person still accountable for the result.
Where they split
Mahajan: keep entry-level work with juniors, and check the skills they build.
Gray: protect junior work, with supervised practice designed in on purpose.
Schroeter: let agents produce, and have juniors review, correct and explain.
Where they agree: juniors need real judgement practice, and someone has to plan for it. Nobody here leaves it to chance.
Where they split: is that practice doing the work, or checking it?
My take
Entry-level work was never just cheap labor. It was the training program nobody labeled as one. Before you hand a task to an agent, ask what a junior would have learned from it, and where that learning happens now. If the answer is nowhere, that is a cost. It just isn't on this quarter's spreadsheet.
Your turn
If an agent took your team's entry-level tasks tomorrow, would you keep juniors doing the work or have them check the agent's? Tell us how you would train your next senior hire.
Next: a Perth clinic owner who got bookings up to 12 a week by removing a step instead of automating it, and UK and Brazilian advisors on why undefined work can't be handed to anyone.
