In this guest blog Chris Simmance the founder of the OMG Center and author of The Next Rung, (out January 2027) talks all about the risk that nobody’s underwriting.
You insure the obvious things. Professional indemnity. Cyber. Key person. The risks that have a claims history and a premium attached.
Here’s one that doesn’t have either yet, and it’s sitting in the middle of nearly every agency I talk to.
Agencies are cutting juniors to ride AI. It makes sense on the spreadsheet. A mid-level person plus a decent AI workflow now does what used to take three juniors and a coordinator. The margin improves. The delivery gets faster. The client doesn’t notice, because the work still lands.
The problem is what that decision quietly removes. Juniors aren’t just cheap hands. They’re the bottom rung of the thing that produces your seniors. The account director you’ll need in 2030 is a junior account exec right now, learning the job by doing the parts of it that AI is about to absorb. Cut the rung and you don’t feel it this year. You feel it in three or four, when the senior you assumed you’d grow internally doesn’t exist, and the market rate for the one you have to hire instead has gone through the roof because everyone else made the same cut at the same time.
A profession that stops growing juniors into seniors atrophies. Slowly. Which is exactly why it gets missed.
This is the kind of risk you spend your working life pricing, so I think you’ll clock it faster than most. It’s slow-building. It’s correlated, because every agency is making the same move in the same window. And it’s mispriced, because nobody’s putting a number on the cost of a hollowed-out talent pipeline. The headline saving is visible. The deferred liability isn’t on any balance sheet.
I’m not arguing against AI in agencies. I build the tools that do some of this displacing, which puts me in an awkward spot to be lecturing anyone. The point isn’t “don’t adopt.” It’s “adopt with your eyes open about the rung you’re removing, and decide on purpose whether you’re keeping a way to grow the next layer of seniors or quietly betting you’ll always be able to buy them in.”
Most agencies are making that bet without knowing they’re making it. That’s the bit worth flagging.
I’ve spent the last while writing about this. The book is called The Next Rung, it’s about what AI is doing to the career ladder in our corner of the economy, and the agency chapter is the one I suspect this audience will recognise themselves in fastest. It’s out in January.
If it sounds like your kind of problem, you can pre-order here. Reply to say you have and you’ll go on the founding readers wall, plus into a draw for a box of copies for your team.
The ground’s moving under the agency model. Worth knowing where it’s soft before you put weight on it.
If you’re thinking about what AI means for the agency career ladder, or want to hear more about The Next Rung, contact Chris at chris@omgcenter.org.
