We are all builders now

What AI is doing to the millennial career, and to the agency I run

When I was a teenager I wanted to be a video games programmer. I bought C++ for Dummies and tried to learn how to code. I couldn’t, for some reason my mind just wasn’t set up for it.

Over the years I’ve tried python and javascript, and each time I get bogged down in trying to memorise syntax, and frustrated. The thing I never wanted to do necessarily was to code, but it was build the thing that came from the code.

AI has taken that wall down. And I’m having the most fun I’ve ever had in my career.

But getting here has meant mourning something first.

I’m 37. Like a lot of millennials who entered professional services in our early 20s, I saw a career path in front of me. My first CEO was in his early 30s. I grew up with nothing and that felt like proof of what was possible if you worked hard and played the game. The path was clear at every rank. Execs became senior execs, then managers, then senior managers, associate directors, directors. Then you either left to start something or you went into leadership.

62% of millennials say work is central to our identity, behind only family and friends. But when I sit down with friends, work is very often one of the primary sources of conversations. We have wittingly or not built a sense of self around that career ladder.

We became defined by our work, and in particular, the workplace has had a cult of management for a long time.

Everyone who goes through the path recognises how odd it is. We spend years learning to execute well – often with very specific training at the start. Only then to be thrust into a management role which none of us are prepared for.

Tech was at the forefront of pushing back on that, inventing the role of the ‘individual contributor’ or IC. After all, not every great software engineer had the want or ability to manage people, and so the IC path allowed them an alternative. You still gained the status of evolving with your job, but it was now linked to building.

At Ballpoint, we’ve always been very top-heavy. Growth strategists run strategy on the accounts, the client relationship and are still in the weeds. But for us, this was about the belief it produced better results for clients – rather than a prediction on an AI future.

But, I think that’s about to be the reality for most professional services businesses.

Think about what a growth strategist actually does. At the core, strategy is deciding what to say no to.

The more experience you have:

• the faster you pattern match,

• the better your decisions,

• the quicker you change direction when something isn’t working.

Two years ago, when a strategist pointed in a direction, a more junior person ran the analysis and built scenarios. Now a good AI does that analysis, and a great AI comes back with experiment ideas the strategist with 10 years of experience hadn’t thought of.

The middle layer of execution and organisation: making sure shit gets done, and carrying out the core analysis tasks, can now be done almost infinitely better with AI.

The result is senior people are doing more hands on work than ever, not less. But it’s not just about the fact these people are doing more hands-on work, they’re also expected – at least at Ballpoint – to be building the systems that improve over time as well.

Two months ago we set a new bar at Ballpoint. Stop using AI to assist your work, and start getting AI to do the work for you. Over 80% of tasks at the agency now begin that way. And where we don’t do it, it’s deliberate. For me, longform writing is the primary one. Writing remains the best way I have ever found to think about a subject.

Getting people to get AI to work for them was phase one. Phase two is getting the AI to do better work than humans. And it’s in these systems where we now expect everyone to plan, research, build, test and iterate.

As of today, I’m most weighted in that direction. A glance at my timesheets show that 20 hours a week go into building. That’s a third of my time spent on executional work. My 22 year old self never would have expected that.

Our head of creative strategy is responsible for building the systems that power his creative strategists. Our head of creative studio for implementing systems that produce results faster. Every single person has an OKR this quarter focused on building.

What happens to juniors in this world?

So how do you train someone into this world?

I watched a documentary years ago about a restaurant chasing its third Michelin star. Junior chefs weren’t allowed to do anything for days except chop onions. They might have been sous chefs elsewhere but in this kitchen you couldn’t touch a stockpot until you’d chopped onions for days and days and days.

I think one version of the future of training looks like that.

Last year, I touched on this in my article on the rise of growth artisans. The idea that individuals will be able to own the entire growth field – and that training has to be done almost as an apprenticeship along the way.

You learn performance marketing by hand. You listen to customer interviews and write the JTBD specs yourself. You write copy yourself. You export the data and analyse it in a spreadsheet. Only once you’ve done it by hand and you’re expert at doing it that way, do you give it to AI.

The cost implications of this are obviously huge. (And for any government worker out there with a grant, we will happily explore this as a training scheme with you). But you’re essentially doing apprenticeships accepting that grads won’t create comparative value for a long time.

There’s a second version that mirrors the multi-disciplinary nature of our new roles.

There’s a future where actually doing that stuff manually is like knowing long division. Maybe it’s worth learning at school to exercise the brain, but in day to day life it’s just never going to come up.

Maybe it doesn’t matter if you’ve never built an ad campaign or written a line of copy or spoken to a customer in real life. The journey from 0 to good enough will be fast, and then better development of AI systems will get you further.

Here the training is broader but maybe shallower. We might learn product management, customer research, AI engineering, copywriting, a bit of Python, graphic design, ethics, taste. They’d be multidisciplinary by default, because the senior role they’re being trained for is multidisciplinary by default. And this idea, especially that of developing taste, is something I’m focused on at a senior level too.

Mourning our old identity

The old world of work we know is about to change, and I think the unspoken thing at the moment is the knowledge we’re going to need to mourn our old expectations and identity.

Last week, Tom Blomfield of YC said that middle management will die. I reckon it will too, though probably slower than some might predict. I think corporates and the humans inside them have too many incentives to protect the status quo.

But for most, I think it’s important to come to terms with the fact that our old career trajectory is about to change. And I think the idea that there are people who just manage other people and don’t do more hands on work themselves or build themselves, will soon feel out of date.

Not every CEO will be a builder. But I think the best ones will be – or perhaps as Jones Road Beauty’s Cody Pfloker just experienced, it’s the AI-enabled CEO who does the job of exploration, only to rebuild the function internally.

But while not every CEO might end up a builder, I do think everyone else will. And I’m fortunately here to say, having come out the other side of that, it’s a pretty fun world.

Ideas were always cheap, execution now is as well. The question is what will you do with it?