The PR Industry is Sleepwalking into a Talent Crisis

Jim Donaldson, the comms agency heavy-hitter and former UK and Middle East CEO of FleishmanHillard, wrote something a few weeks ago that has stayed with me. He’s right that the holdcos are under enormous pressure, that independents are picking up the slack, and that this is the biggest structural shift the industry has seen in a generation. But there’s an obvious question underneath all of this that I don’t think anyone has quite worked out the answer to: if we’re dismantling the pyramid, who trains the next generation?

The pyramid: a revenue model and training ground

For thirty years, the agency pyramid did two things simultaneously: firstly it made agencies money, and secondly it developed talent. Junior people learned by being thrown into the fire. They were sitting in on client calls, watching senior practitioners handle a crisis, and writing the first draft that got torn apart and rebuilt. The billable hour funded the apprenticeship. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it produced the senior leaders the industry now depends on.

That system is rapidly disappearing. AI is taking over the execution work that once justified large junior headcounts. According to Adweek, staff-level jobs at ad agencies in the US are down 10% since 2022, as junior roles are treated like short-term costs rather than long-term investments, and the same pattern is visible here in the UK. The holdcos are restructuring around experienced people. The independents, rightly celebrated for their growth, are typically built around one or two senior practitioners who don’t have the infrastructure, or frankly the time, to run a development programme. In the conversations behind our AI interview series last year, communications leaders kept returning to the same question about junior staff.

So who is developing the next generation?

The impact won’t be immediate

For the time being, the existing mid-level talent pool absorbs the gap. But in three to five years, agencies that have scaled back their junior intake will find themselves competing for a smaller pool of AMs and ADs. I see the early signs every day, but one of the biggest red flags is the difficulty in finding that mid-layer of talent. It’s not uncommon to have clients come to me saying that they can’t find an SAM or AD that’s up to scratch. The mid-level pool is thinning and the development of raw talent and intelligence into judgment and competence is being missed.

Other industries already sounding the alarm

This clearly isn’t uniquely a PR problem. Investment banking runs on the same apprenticeship model as PR, and it’s further ahead in confronting this issue. Major banks including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Citigroup and Barclays are cutting junior analyst classes by as much as two-thirds as AI takes over entry-level work. As Debasish Patnaik, senior partner at McKinsey’s QuantumBlack AI arm, put it: “Banking is an apprenticeship business. Today’s junior analysts become tomorrow’s managing directors. Senior judgment cannot be manufactured laterally.”

And Goldman Sachs is now wrestling with what they call the risk of AI ‘cognitive atrophy’: the concern that even where junior roles survive, people aren’t learning from doing the work if AI is doing it for them. It’s a question being discussed openly in other sectors, and PR needs to join the conversation.

The independent boom doesn’t solve this

I don’t mean to diminish how exciting the growth of specialist and independent agencies is, and I’m seeing it up close with new announcements practically every week on LinkedIn. But the independent model, for all its virtues, is not structured to solve the development problem. Increasingly, agencies are plugging the gap with fractional practitioners and freelancers, which works as a short term fix, but ultimately it’s more of a plaster than a long-term strategy.

The industry is starting to look like a snake eating its own tail.

What needs to happen

First, the industry needs to stop treating junior hiring as a cost and start treating it as an investment with a five-year payback period. The agencies hardest to compete with in the coming years will be the ones that leaned into junior mentorship and developed people who combine great instincts with AI fluency.

Second, independents and boutiques winning right now have an opportunity to think about development differently. The apprenticeship doesn’t have to look like the old model, but some version of it needs to exist.

Third, this issue doesn’t exist in a vacuum and PR needs to watch and learn from others who are further ahead. For example, Bank of America still brought in 4,000 summer interns and campus recruits in June of this year, and views AI as a tool for efficiency, not a replacement for junior positions. JP Morgan has said they’ll tackle the issue using attrition, early retirement, and retraining of the workforce. PR needs to stop waiting for the answer to emerge and start having this conversation out in the open.

The people Jim describes, the ones with the scars, the ones clients will pay for, were made somewhere, and for better or worse, that somewhere was the pyramid. Before we celebrate its demise too enthusiastically, we should have a plan for what comes next.

Allyson Kurian is an Associate Partner at Hanson Executive, a specialist executive search firm. She places senior communications and business leaders across the UK, Europe and the US.