{"id":18477,"date":"2026-07-22T01:57:18","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T05:57:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/advertisingweek.com\/aw360\/the-agentic-ai-judgment-cliff-we-need-to-price-in\/"},"modified":"2026-07-17T19:46:53","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T23:46:53","slug":"the-agentic-ai-judgment-cliff-we-need-to-price-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/advertisingweek.com\/aw360\/news\/the-agentic-ai-judgment-cliff-we-need-to-price-in\/18477\/","title":{"rendered":"The Agentic AI Judgment Cliff We Need To Price In"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Tony Russo, Mile Marker, Vice President of AI Innovation & Strategy<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Our agency\u2019s open roles right now skew senior. We need judgment on the floor today, so we\u2019re hiring for it directly. In so doing, we\u2019re choosing the near-term need while watching the long-term bill accrue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s why that bill exists. Every job early in my career started with work nobody wanted: pulling the reports, reconciling the numbers that didn\u2019t match, building the decks.\u00a0 Tedious, low-value, and an agent could do all of it today in seconds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

It was also the training program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

You learn by reconciling two thousand numbers until the wrong one starts to feel wrong before you can explain why. Judgment isn\u2019t taught, it\u2019s accumulated, in the boring reps nobody enjoys and everybody wants to skip. And agentic AI is very, very good at exactly those reps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

So we as an industry must recognize and acknowledge that\u00a0 we\u2019re handing the bottom rung of the ladder to machines. The pitch is the one you\u2019ve heard at every conference this year: let the agents take the grunt work, move your people up to the high-value thinking, everybody wins. It sounds inarguable. It even sounds humane.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

But the grunt work is the ladder. You don\u2019t get to keep the senior strategist and automate the path that made them. Take away the two thousand boring reps and you haven\u2019t freed the junior to do better work; you\u2019ve removed the only way the junior was ever going to become the senior. We\u2019re not just automating tasks. We\u2019re automating the internship, and the assistants, and the junior planners and analysts, and calling it efficiency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

This is a challenge facing\u00a0 every business deploying agents to cut \u201cmanual\u201d effort . What makes this all so tricky is that\u00a0 it doesn\u2019t feel like a mistake while you\u2019re making it. It feels like a win.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Output goes up, costs come down. The demo dazzles the client, boardrooms celebrate the \u201cinnovation.\u201d None of the dashboards you actually watch will show you the thing you\u2019re losing, because the thing you\u2019re losing is a person who doesn\u2019t exist yet: the senior, five years out, who never got built. Bench erosion doesn\u2019t have a line on the P&L. You don\u2019t notice the missing seniors until the day you reach for one and they aren\u2019t there. By then, the fix is a decade out, because that\u2019s how long judgment takes to grow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The traditional apprenticeship produced three things as a byproduct, and they\u2019re the three things the agent era can\u2019t easily replace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n