Across creative and media, AI is reaching senior leadership as an operating-model change that comes with a margin gain. Generative models and AI agents now carry out a steadily increasing percentage of the production and reporting processes that junior team members once conducted. When you compare this with this year’s margins the financial decision makes perfect sense.
But those processes were where the industry formed its future leaders. The commercial judgement a board now expects from a chief operating officer was established there, through minor decisions taken years before anyone held decision rights over a far greater one.
In the US, entry-level hiring is falling fastest where AI can already do the most. Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab tracks employment by how much of each occupation generative AI can perform. By August 2026, employment of 22 to 25-year-olds in the occupations where it can perform the most stood 19% behind comparable workers in occupations where it can perform less.
In the UK, the IPA’s latest Agency Census counted 19.2% fewer agency employees aged 25 and under in a single year.
The accounts record the saving but never the long-term cost
A labour saving reaches the board quantified and dated. Omnicom’s investor presentation earlier this year set out $645 million of labour-related cost savings for 2026, rising to $1 billion by 2028, tied to its acquisition of Interpublic.
Stanford traced the gap for young workers mainly to reduced hiring, and a graduate who was never hired leaves no redundancy cost and no gap on an organisation chart. Nothing in the management accounts records the value that person would have created by their fifth year.
The succession cost arrives sooner than boards assume. Today’s Directors learned the commercial side of the business before generative AI arrived in 2022. The layer that will succeed them is being formed now. When a senior post falls vacant in the early 2030s, the board will find fewer internal successors with the capability to undertake it.
The gap is already prominent at the leadership level below executive
In skills audits of 1,300 UK creative employers published in May 2026, the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre found that 43% of those reporting skills shortages said the shortage sat at experienced level. A board with strategic plans to appoint senior leaders externally is targeting a constrained level of talent.
Working with a client in the early stages of your career exposes junior professionals to the company’s revenue model. A first media plan or a first sales report shows a new entrant what the client values and what the company can afford to concede. Repeated over years, those decisions build the judgement a board later expects from a managing director.
“Even when it comes to the marketing, the sellers, or everything, that’s how you learn about the business,” a senior leader inside a US media group told us. “If all of that is being automated and you don’t understand what that is or supposed to look like or what you’re really even saying, how are you going to grow?”
Management answers for the operating model and the board for what it produces
The operating model falls within management authority, and it should stay there. The chief executive sets it with the chief operating officer, the chief technology officer and the chief people officer. Together they decide which processes pass to AI and answer for the margin that follows.
An AI model can draft that first media plan while a junior team member stays the human in the loop, presenting it to the client with budget authority in their own name. Whether that choice is made decides what the saving costs.
Accountability for succession sits with the board. Provision 17 of the UK Corporate Governance Code asks the nomination committee to keep plans in place for orderly succession to the board and senior management, and to “oversee the development of a diverse pipeline for succession”. The Code defines senior management as the executive committee or the first layer below board level.
Boards already find the internal pipeline the weakest part of succession. In the NACD’s 2024 survey of US public company directors, 58% named maintaining a strong internal pipeline as the hardest part of CEO succession. Thirty per cent said their board had no successor identified.
The NACD’s 2026 Governance Outlook ranks CEO succession planning as the board practice most in need of improvement. In the same outlook, 76% of directors expect AI to factor into their growth strategy.
An operating-model paper that reaches the board should show two figures, the headcount cost it removes and its effect on the successors the company expects to develop. The second figure counts the posts below Director level that carry decision rights over a client budget before and after the change, and the chief people officer supplies it.
External appointment works best as a choice
WPP’s board appointed its chief executive from Microsoft in 2025. Cindy Rose had sat on the WPP board since 2019, and the chair cited her experience of AI and enterprise technology. The appointment was a choice made by a board that already knew the appointee.
A confidential search has a place in any sound succession plan.
The next saving the board approves also decides who will be ready to join its executive committee.