• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, June 17, 2026

I spent the last few weeks reading all the headlines about how AI is coming for the entry-level job.

The reports aren’t subtle. One recent study found that 91% of senior agency leaders expect AI to reduce their headcount, while 57% have already slowed or paused entry-level hiring.

That’s not great for those of us with kids entering the workforce over the next few years.  It’s absolutely frightening if you follow the thread and realize exactly how much you learned in those early years, and realize this next generation may not have the chance to learn those lessons.

I was worried, and then I started thinking.  My worry turned to concern, and in concern I formulated an opinion.  With that opinion, I changed my mind.

The agency business is but one aspect of the advertising, media, and marketing industry.  AI is disrupting the process for entry-level employees, negating many of the roles they are needed to fill, but it also opens opportunities.  The most glaring opportunity is for AI to enable these new entrants to the workforce to create ideas, create companies, and, in doing so, create jobs.  AI can and will fuel a surge in entrepreneurship that could dramatically change the industry landscape.  That is a very exciting prospect.

AI allows not only the ability to vibe-code an idea into existence, but it enables a new company to scale its back-end systems and mundane processes much faster, so a person with an idea can focus on the idea itself, bring it to market faster, and determine if there’s product-market fit much faster than ever before. 

The math of starting a business has fundamentally changed. A single person with the right stack of AI tools can now do what used to require a team of 10. The research, the design, the development, the operations, the analytics, all of it sits inside tools that cost a few thousand dollars a year instead of a few hundred thousand in salaries. If you have an idea, you build it quickly and create a network to test it and drive toward scale.

A Fortune survey of recent graduates found that nearly 38% are considering starting their own business, a third are looking at gig work, and more than a quarter are exploring freelance. That is a majority of new grads building a career outside of full-time employment. Separately, 43% of Gen Z say they plan to start a business this year, the highest of any generation. They are not waiting for someone to hire them. They are hiring themselves.

This is not the gig economy we already know. That version was about filling gaps: Driving a car between shifts, picking up task work to cover the rent. It was survival, dressed up as flexibility.

What’s happening now is different. These are actual companies: micro-agencies, product businesses, one-person shops that compete for the same work a holding company would pitch, run by founders who use AI as the staff they never have to hire.

Our industry is built for this more than almost any other. Advertising is a service business. It runs on talent, taste, relationships, and ideas, and those are exactly the things AI cannot replace. A 23-year-old with a point of view, a network, and a stack of tools can run a boutique that punches well above its size.  

Instead of a workforce where almost everyone is a full-time employee of one of a handful of large companies, you get a network of specialists, small operators, and one-person shops that brands assemble around a project and disband when it is done. The org chart stops being a chart and becomes a web. The holding companies stop owning headcount and start orchestrating talent.

This is a very exciting prospect, and it is the direction I am guiding my kids toward to help them have a fruitful future.  Less FTE, more SMB.  That gives them a path and control to shape their future.  It is not the same path I took, and that may be just what they need to succeed!